Left the American behind: swimmers Rylov and Kolesnikov won gold and silver in the 100 m backstroke

We expected gold from Kolesnikov, and Rylov won it.

Externally very on duty, starting on the second track, where I got with the fifth semifinal result.

Two "leadership" corridors went to the absolute (in backstroke) Olympic champion Rio Ryan Murphy and the debutant of the Games - Clement.

Their semi-final results were divided by a microscopic value of 0.05 seconds, and it immediately became clear who exactly would fight for the main medal of the Games in the final.

As it turned out, Eugene had his own personal scenario for this case. 

When the winner is ahead of the opponent by 0.02 (namely, this difference was highlighted on the scoreboard and, alas, not in favor of Kolesnikov), they like to call it luck.

Like, someone is just more fortunate.

But 0.02 is not about speed, but about character.

The athlete's ability to snatch a touch at the last centimeter of the distance indicates, first of all, that the person was one hundred percent ready to perform.

One hundred percent focused on his actions.

Like at the Olympic Games in Beijing, nine-time (at that time) Olympic champion Michael Phelps was ready to finish at the hundred-meter butterfly stroke, and Milorad Cavic is not ready.

Although in speed, the Serb won that distance over the American.

It was so obvious that at the last meter of the distance, Chavich himself managed to believe that he was a champion.

And then Phelps quickly thrust his hands into the finish wall ...

Now you can see deep symbolism in the fact that it was Rylov, when he was still swimming in juniors, that the four-time Olympic champion Alexander Popov drew attention. When I asked why this particular guy was so into the soul of the legendary swimmer, Popov replied: “He's really good. And he has a very smart coach. "

And again a parallel: once the fate of sports brought together in one temporary space Popov, floating on his back, and the still not old coach - Gennady Turetsky.

The first thing that the new mentor did was to turn the athlete from back to chest.

This is how the world got its greatest sprinter.

Only by that time Turetsky already had serious coaching experience: his first great athlete Gennady Prigoda was the third freestyle on the "fifty kopeck" freestyle at the 1988 Games in Seoul.

And Andrey Shishin's little Zhenya Rylov became the boy of the first coaching set.

When there is no experience, there is not enough knowledge, but the soul is incinerated by the desire to throw the whole world at your feet.

They left it - in Tokyo.

But who could have guessed that this would happen at the hundred meter race?

Any great success is always a whole chain of accidents. I don’t know how correct it will be to use the word “lucky” here, but after Popov (and on his initiative, by the way) in the personal sports space of Shishin and Rylov, Mikhail Zubkov, a magnificent and very subtle connoisseur of swimming technique, appeared. Gulnara Romanadze, the director of a sports club in Vidnoe near Moscow, played a huge, and perhaps invaluable role.

After 17-year-old Rylov won two distances at the Youth Olympic Games in Nanjing, she personally petitioned the municipal authorities to give the family, which had been roaming around rented apartments for several years after moving from Novotroitsk, to their own home.

Then she found money for training, bought the necessary simulators and equipment.

And who knows how Rylov's career could have developed if this all-consuming concern had not happened in his life.

Regarding the one hundred meter distance, Evgeny once noticed that it is not so easy to combine it with the main one, that is, two hundred meters.

First, it is a different technique.

Secondly, work at a hundred-meter distance requires a huge volume of loads in the gym, strength and very hard workouts in the water, and this greatly slows down speed progress in a longer swim.

“At 200 meters, muscles are loaded differently.

Going out after two hundred meters to the "hundred", as a rule, does not work out too well - the muscles are used in different ways.

But I really want to climb both distances, ”the swimmer explained in an interview.

The schedule of starts in Olympic Tokyo in this regard turned out to be in Rylov's hands.

Even the morning time of the finals, unusual for swimmers, played in his favor: as part of the ISL commercial series, Evgeny somehow had to start very late in the evening, and he admitted that it was a difficult test for him.

The swimmer did not start in the 4x100 m freestyle relay, which Russia crushingly lost the day before. Accordingly, he was not overly tired physically and emotionally nailed. Theoretically, he could well qualify for a place in the relay line-up: after all, Evgeny's track record includes the relay gold of the 2018 European Championship and the sprint silver of the 2019 world championship. It is even possible that his presence in this form would have helped to avoid such a shocking outcome, but now there is definitely no need to regret it.

Is it worth pitying Kolesnikov? In part, yes. Losing Olympic gold always hurts. We all saw a rehearsal of an absolutely similar situation on Sunday, when the Russian saber fencer Sophia Velikaya lost in the fencing final at the third Olympics in a row. On the other hand, Rylov himself five years ago found himself in a very similar situation at the Games in Rio: he was the first to qualify for the final at the 200m, mentally already managed not to feel like a champion, but, going to the start in the final, he thought by his own words, not about the distance, but about how not to lose it. And he lost.

Rylov's victory in the hundred-meter race in Tokyo turned out to be very "working". When I phoned Shishin with congratulations, he immediately warned that there was a maximum of two minutes for a conversation. He explained: they say, immediately after the award ceremony, Rylov should be prepared for the evening swim in the 4x200 m relay, and he should be redeemed properly after the 100-meter race, so that his muscles recover and have time to rest. And regarding such a long-awaited victory, which for certain has yet to be realized, the coach said: “I would, of course, be upset if Zhenya sailed to the finish line not with gold, but with silver. Still, at both distances on the back, he was selected in Tokyo as the first number. I can say for sure: it would be much easier for us to cook one of these types. So in this respect Rylov and I are constantly walking along the edge. But so far it turns out. "