Add Category
Rivalries are the lifeblood of sport.
Nothing compares to the intensity between two evenly matched foes, whether it be on the track, in the ring, off-piste or in the pool.
Tuesday morning's (AEST) women's 200-metre freestyle final is going to give us another edition of a brewing rivalry between two women who know each other impossibly well.
Ariarne Titmus. Mollie O'Callaghan. A gold medal on the line — and perhaps a world record to regain or retain.
If all this is about to sound familiar, there's a very good reason for it. We've been here before, after all.
But this is a point that bears repeating, as it is a rivalry like no other in world sport.
These two great rivals do not just share a pool once a season at major championships.
No.
They share one an awful lot of the time; training at the same club, under the same coach, in the same pool. Every. Single. Day.
They shared a semifinal at Paris La Défense Arena too, alongside Hong Kong's Siobhán Bernadette Haughey and China's Yang Junxuan.
That meant the four swimmers that have swum 14 of the 15 fastest times in the world since the last Olympics in Tokyo all swam in the same heat.
The only person missing, Summer McIntosh, is not swimming in this event at this Games.
Amidst such illustrious competition, Titmus and O'Callaghan measured their efforts to perfection, finishing 1-2 in their semifinal in times of 1:54.64 and 1:54.70 respectively, qualifying first and second fastest for the final.
Titmus went out hard and controlled her effort from there on out, a tactic she regularly employs in the 200m, while O'Callaghan displayed her lightning underwater work on the third turn to overhaul the field after taking a comfortable start.
"I'm just stoked to be here," O'Callaghan told Channel Nine.
"To have such a stacked semifinal, you know, I got Siobhán, Arnie, countless other women.
"I was mainly thinking about myself and setting up for tomorrow."
Titmus said the prospect of such a stacked final was "exciting" when asked by Channel Nine.
"It is good to have a race. It is going to be a tough race tomorrow for sure. But it would be good to see what I'm capable of."
The two are very different personalities and come at this 200m in very different ways.
O'Callaghan, 20, comes up to the 200m from the 100m sprint events, while 23-year-old Titmus is very much a middle-distance swimmer, coming down to the 200m from her favoured 400m.
This eight-lap race is the happy medium that brings two Aussie stars together, the crucible that can and will develop enough heat and pressure to make diamonds of them both.
O'Callaghan, still a relative newbie despite having three individual world championship gold medals in her cabinet in South East Queensland, has been known to be nervous heading into major events.
At the Australian trials, O'Callaghan admitted she struggled coming into the event, burned with being the world record holder, and that it was almost a relief to lose the record to her teammate.
Another thing that may have eased the pressure is the knowledge that O'Callaghan has already won a gold medal from night one in the 4x100m relay, her fourth gold medal to go alongside the one bronze she has already won in relays at the Games.
"I was lot calmer than I was at nationals," O'Callaghan told Channel Nine.
"I think the pressure of having that world record previously weighed on me and screwed me around on the final.
"To walk in here and be like, this is my first Olympics, I have no title on my head, nothing to lose [was good].
"Obviously I still got nerves … but I have an amazing support team behind me. I think it's very normal for every single Olympic athlete to experience nerves.
"I'm excited to race Arnie tomorrow night."
Titmus, incidentally, "only" has three gold medals, although all are in individual events, plus a silver and a bronze.
When Titmus ripped the world record out of O'Callaghan's hands at the trials in Brisbane, she said coming close to breaking her own 400m world record the day before had given her the confidence she could do something special in the shorter event — which has one questioning how much confidence winning a second 400m title and cementing her status as a legend of the sport would have given her.
The stacked nature of the 400m has, over the past couple of years, seen it be tagged as the race that everyone wants to see at any international meet.
But now, perhaps, the 200m is turning into the race with the greatest depth of talent at the sharp end.
When Titmus broke the world record in that most thrilling of races in Brisbane, she said it was not really something she was targeting, but rather that being the fastest ever was simply the by-product of the hard work she put into her training.
"I just really wanted to put together a great swim and have the chance to do it again in Paris," she said then
Well, now she is here and that chance has arrived.
- The women's 200m final is scheduled for 5:48am on Tuesday AEST. ABC Sport will live blog all the Olympics action each day at abc.net.au/sport
Sports content to make you think... or allow you not to. A newsletter delivered each Saturday.