Team USA had the school-carnival swagger but Chinese star had the blistering speed

For everything at stake at an Olympic Games, there is something joyous about the final night at the pool when, once the last of the individual medals are decided, the relays take over and the world’s best swimmers are transported back to their local school carnival.

You can almost hear the derisive sniffing from athletics aficionados reading this. They have long argued, and will continue to hold, that this is why Olympic swimming should never be taken as seriously as what happens at the track.

It is an argument which, when weighing the relative, global reach of athletics with swimming, has some merit – and misses the point entirely.

Sometimes, sport just has to be fun. Until they include skinny-dipping as an event sanctioned by World Aquatics, you’ll be hard-pressed to have a better time at an Olympics than watching the final two races of the swimming program.

First, to set the scene.

In school-sports parlance, the US swim team are the cool kids from the private college in a nice part of town who swagger into every competition knowing they are going to leave with a bunch of blue ribbons pinned to their chests and another shiny cup to put in the headmaster’s cabinet.

Credit: Matt Golding

They have the best togs and the whitest teeth. Their parents drive the nicest cars. And they are stone-cold deadly relay swimmers.

Largely due to their relay dominance, the US have won the most gold medals in swimming at every Olympic Games they have competed in since Melbourne some 68 years ago, when aquatic legends such as Murray Rose, Dawn Fraser, and Jon Henricks ruled the coathanger pool.

Fraser was in the house in Paris on Sunday night and always makes her presence felt but otherwise those great names have faded out of time and into memory, as the US has carved up Olympic swimming into its own sporting fiefdom.

At the start of last night’s final session, Australia were leading the gold medal count – as they have since the very first night of competition in Paris – with seven gold medals to six for the US. Having gone out harder than Cameron McEvoy, the Australian team was grimly hanging on, aching to get to the wall first.

Enter the wonderfully named Bobby Finke, a two-time Olympic champion from Tokyo who looks as though he could have taken a minor part alongside Rose in Ride the Wild Surf. In one of the best swims we have seen at this pool, Finke produced a stunning effort to set a new world record in the 1500-metre freestyle and clinch the tying gold medal for Team USA.

Bobby Finke with his gold medal for the men’s 1500-metre freestyle event.Credit: AP

The whole shebang would come down the 4x100-metre medley relays.

The men came first, with Kyle Chalmers leading the Australian team out with a white towel around his head, like a heavyweight boxer heading to the ring. As every team sauntered onto the pool deck, hands held high, the crowd noise pumped up to Leon Marchand levels, which is somewhere between death-metal and nerve damage.

When Marchand walked out with the French, the damage was done.

Australia were never really in the hunt for a medal in this race, which produced a ripping three-way battle royale between the US, China and Team Marchand. With a touch of poetic justice, a smidge of irony and bucketload of speed, it was China’s Pan Zhanle who had the last say.

Trailing by nearly a second at the final change, Pan produced a scorching final leg of 45.92 – the fastest relay swim the world has ever seen – to mow down France’s Florent Manaudou and America’s Hunter Armstrong and win his, and China’s, second gold medal of the meet, with the US taking silver.

This left things all square with one race to go.

China celebrate their win in the men’s medley relay.Credit: Brynn Anderson

By this stage, the La Défense Arena was cooking. The best thing about the last day of swimming is that athletes who’ve had the pressure of competition riding on their shoulders all week shake it off and cram into a spare seat to watch their mates swim. They regress, just one night, from sporting stars to adolescents drunk on school spirit.

Into this bubbling mix of happiness, pride, relief and joy walked the women’s medley relay teams for the final swim race of the Olympics. Australia and the US each had one hand on bragging rights for the next four years and less than four minutes of swimming would decide it.

Kaylee McKeown matched her American rival Regan Smith in the backstroke and Jenna Strauch did her best to hold on to world-record-holder and Olympic champion Lilly King – but it is not for nothing that Team USA swaggers into every meet.

By the end of the breaststroke, a three-body-length gap had opened between the US and the rest of the world. In the race for minor medals, Emma McKeon and Mollie O’Callaghan brought it home for silver.

It wasn’t quite the finish Australia were hoping for but, then, it never is once Olympic swimming goes into carnival mood.

And in the bigger scheme of things, it doesn’t matter a jot.

Sign up for our Sports Newsletter to get Olympic Games updates and general sport news, results and expert analysis straight to your inbox.