Done talking about doping, Horton’s attention has switched to Tokyo after rediscovering his love of hard training
Mack Horton’s world championship protest is water under the bridge for the Aussie swimming jet. With drug cheat Sun Yang out of the picture, his focus is now on getting his mind and body in shape to defend his 400m Olympic title.
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Five months have passed since Sun Yang was booted out of swimming for eight years and Mack Horton is still no closer to getting the gold medal he should have been awarded at last year’s world championships.
Swimming’s world governing body had promised to look into the possibility of promoting Horton from silver but sources within FINA have told News Corp the matter has still not even been discussed at board level.
That’s just typical of the way FINA operates.
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Deciding important issues relating to swimmers happened at a snail’s pace while any matter affecting the sport’s bureaucrats accelerate faster than Winx.
The most recent review into the governance of international sporting bodies by the Association of Summer Olympic International Federations (ASOIF) ranked FINA on the lowest tier, along with weightlifting and judo.
Instead of taking that on board, FINA fired off an angry letter to the ASOIF asking that the damning assessment be changed.
If Horton is surprised or disappointed by FINA’s tardy response to his case, he’s not saying because he’s done talking about the whole episode.
He said everything he needed to with his courageous protest at the world championships, which was aimed not at Sun, but at the officials who have failed to protect clean athletes.
That’s all water under the bridge now as far as Horton is concerned as he turns his mind and body to trying to defend his 400 metre freestyle Olympic title.
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Ian Thorpe and Murray Rose are the only men to have won the eight-lap event at successive Olympics and if it hadn’t been for the global pandemic, Horton would have been defending his crown on Sunday.
“I didn’t even know what day it was to be honest because I just deleted everything out of my calendar. I don’t need that anymore and I haven’t really looked back,” he said.
“I’ve just kind of been enjoying the time that we’ve had to slowly build back up and I guess putting my focus into that rather than what could have been this year.”
As Horton’s opponents have discovered, his easygoing manner hides the fire that still burns in his belly.
One of the hardest trainers in Australian Olympic sport, his gruelling workouts are legendary and the lockdown has only helped remind him why he pushes his body so hard.
“Having eight weeks out of the water I’ve never been so desperate to swim in my life,” he said.
“Usually when I’m training, I’d be doing 6-7km every session but we’ve just hit 5km, so we’re really taking our time and working on all the little skills to master.
“The initial lockdown was a novelty probably for the first week and then I started to get quite bored. I got into cycling a bit, running, tennis, just like anything to get fit but none of it really came close to the feeling that you get from swimming.”
Originally a 1500m swimmer, Horton’s been steadily coming down in distance as he gets older and tries to add more speed.
He swam a blistering anchor leg in the Australian 4x200m relay that won gold at the world championships and the 24-year-old is trying to be consistently faster so he can remain on the team.
“I’ve always loved the relays but is my body in a position to do that at every major meet?” he said.
“Previously, not necessarily because sometimes the speed’s there, sometimes it isn’t but we’re working hard on that, to try and improve that 400m.
“The 400m is the focus but for the 400m to get better the 200m needs to get better.”
Originally published as Done talking about doping, Horton’s attention has switched to Tokyo after rediscovering his love of hard training
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