Surprise: This Tuesday Florian Wellbrock does not start in a competition at the World Swimming Championships.
Since Saturday evening, 6:17 p.m., Wellbrock has been in constant use.
It started with the 1500m race in the Duna Arena pool.
Wellbrock lost world champion status at this distance and won the bronze medal.
The race of the open water relay followed at noon on Sunday, two swimmers each went one and a half kilometers through the water of Lake Lupa.
Wellbrock swam the German quartet as the final swimmer to the world title.
And on Monday morning at nine, less than 39 hours after the 1500-meter race on Saturday evening, Wellbrock began crawling through the water of the former quarry pond on the outskirts of Budapest again: the five-kilometer race was on.
The question of attention
A good fifty minutes later, he emerged from the water as world champion.
The mammoth program had started on Saturday with a defeat against Gregorio Paltrinieri, but this time the Magdeburg player outperformed the Italian.
Mychajlo Romantschuk, Wellbrock's training colleague in war exile in Magdeburg and now obviously also a world-class open water swimmer, was third.
"Here we are again," Paltrinieri wrote under the pictures with which he congratulated Wellbrock and Romantschuk on their "incredible job".
There they are, and there they stay, also in a figurative sense.
The race over the Olympic ten kilometers is scheduled for Wednesday.
In Tokyo, Wellbrock swam up and away from everyone.
And FINA, the international swimming federation, will award the titles that Wellbrock, Paltrinieri and Romanchuk are fighting for two more times before the 2024 Olympics.
It will be interesting to see what role the best German swimmer will play in the years to come and how much public attention it will bring – to him and his sport.
Meaningful snapshot
Because there wasn't much to see of Wellbrock's successes in continuous use.
ZDF, the rights holder, was busy broadcasting the German championships, grouped under its own brand "Finals", with a lot of effort and marketing on all platforms including children's news and had refrained from broadcasting the more sportingly relevant World Cup.
ZDF sports director Thomas Fuhrmann had referred to the German press agency on their short-term appointment.
It will be transferred again in the future.
But the snapshot - the best swimmers in the world can only be seen in news programs and via an English-language streaming service - also expresses the importance of swimming in Europe's largest television market.
Alone: that someone like Wellbrock would have been a much bigger number elsewhere for a long time is a statement that is as correct as it is banal.
It says nothing about his remarkable athletic achievements.
It doesn't get any better than that.
And nothing more anyway.