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When rising distance freestyle duo Mack Horton and Jac McLaughlin seek to restore ‘business as usual’ for Australia’s illustrious Olympic 1500m tradition in Rio, they’ll be shadowed by an Italian double act.
Their twenty year old Azzuri counterparts, Gregorio Paltrinieri and Gabriele Detti, are respectively within a second of Horton’s and McLaughlin’s impressive Rio Trials qualifying times.
The quartet sits comfortably at the head of 2016 rankings.
Australia’s historical claims to pre-eminence in the event rest not only on the gold medal count, but also total podium finishes.
But the last two winners have collected their golds to the tune of anthems unfamiliar to the event. Tunisia’s Oussama Mellouli beat Grant Hackett for gold in Beijing and China’s Sun Yang was the clear winner in London.
Horton’s career best of 14.39.59 won our trials and was only eight seconds outside Yang’s world record.
That Horton deliberately pushed his heat to a world top five ranked time the previous day to test his back-up fitness, indicates a fresher Horton can go much faster in Rio.
MacLaughlan’s huge personal best to finish within ten seconds of Horton must see him not only as a medal chance, but an outside threat to his teammate.
It is uncertain if Yang will defend his title in Rio. A recent casualty of the current ‘droping’ (doctor-prescribed doping), epidemic, Yang pulled out of last year’s Kazan world titles final after complaining of ‘heart pain’.
The trimetazidine drug he was sanctioned for is typically prescribed for chronic heart ailments. His withdrawal also came on the heels of a ‘lane rage’ incident in which he was accused of lashing out at a Brazilian female competitor.
Paltrinieri then won the final, with Horton well back after coming down with a severe attack of stomach sickness which later proved to be the debilitating Blastocystis bug.