Before the 100m final, Mollie’s hands did not tremble. Perhaps it was a sign

Paris: On Wednesday night, Mollie O’Callaghan’s hands did not shake. She did not continue to fumble with her goggles right up until the starter called “take your marks”. Right up until it felt too late to still be trembling and also to win the race that followed.

On Monday night, O’Callaghan, possessed by such intense nervous energy she might have shaken herself right off the starting blocks, overcame peak anxiety to beat the seasoned campaigner that is Ariarne Titmus. To dethrone her training partner and the reigning champion, and claim her first individual Olympic gold medal in the women’s 200m freestyle final.

By Wednesday night, the hard part was over. The 20-year-old had already bested her most relentless rival and the insane pre-race hype that came with it. The 100m freestyle final was, in some ways, supposed to be the icing on her cake. A chance to face another crack field and come out on top. Maybe even stand on the podium with another training partner in Shayna Jack.

History was in the offing, too. A gold medal would have made O’Callaghan the first swimmer from any nation to win the 100-200m freestyle double at one Olympics since Pieter van den Hoogenband at the Sydney 2000 Games. The only other women to have achieved the sport’s rarest double were Barbara Krause in 1980 and Kornelia Ender in 1976, both for East Germany at the height of the country’s systematic doping regime.

“I was really nervous heading into this,” O’Callaghan said. “I haven’t had a lot of sleep in the past few days, and I tried really hard to manage myself and get up for this. I knew the 100m freestyle was going to be hard because it’s a lot about speed, and that’s something I really lack in.”

That is both true and not true. O’Callaghan is so quick, and finishes notoriously fast. Her personal best over 100m is the 52.08 seconds she clocked last year. What she might mean is that the additional two laps of the 200m generally gives her more time to kick. Still, on Wednesday night her hands did not tremble.

Aussies Mollie O’Callaghan and Shayna Jack missed out on a medal in the women’s 100m freestyle final.Credit: Eddie Jim

All of that could mean something, or it could mean nothing in the context of a 100m final that threw up the biggest upset of the swimming program so far. The pre-race assumption had been that if it wasn’t going to be O’Callaghan, it might well be Hong Kong’s Siobhan Haughey, sandwiched between the two Australians in lane four.

It wasn’t her, either. Instead, it was a Swedish veteran who had not even planned to contest this event but eventually threw her hat in the ring on the belief this was not an overly strong field. So Sarah Sjoestroem squeezed into the final, and then came from the clouds to win it from lane seven in 52.16 seconds. In second was Torri Huske of the United States. Then came Haughey in bronze.

If anyone hyping this race up as another Australian one-two victory required proof of just how difficult it is to win any Olympic medal, they needed only to watch O’Callaghan and Jack finish fourth and fifth respectively. O’Callaghan’s fast finish eluded her, and when she touched in 52.34 seconds - one-hundredth of a second shy of bronze - there was a sense the acute pressure with which the young champion regularly struggles might have finally prevailed.

“I knew it was going to be a tough race,” O’Callaghan said. “From the start we were all very close. It was one of those races ... literally everything counts - if you stuff something up it really costs you. To be honest, I’m happy with it. It’s not a great time for me, I expected a lot more. But at the end of the day, you’ve just got to suck it up and wait another four years.”

That is also the case for Jack, another Dean Boxall student who made the most of a maiden individual Olympic final she never thought would happen. The 25-year-old missed out on the Tokyo Games while she served a two-year doping ban after testing positive to the banned substance Ligandrol in 2019. After the Court of Arbitration for Sport found she had ingested the substance unknowingly and halved the standard four-year ban, she returned in time for Paris with a vengeance.

Having already been a part of Australia’s triumphant women’s 4x100m freestyle relay team alongside O’Callaghan four nights ago, she was philosophical about this result (52.72 seconds).

“To be honest, I came into this with a positive mindset, and I’m coming out quite emotional because of what I just achieved and how proud I am myself and representing my country doing it,” Jack said. “I think people definitely look at the outcomes and always focus so far ahead that they forget to enjoy the moment. And so for me, I really wanted to walk out, soak up the crowd, enjoy that.”

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