Madeline Groves is no ordinary 21-year-old. Yesterday, she swam the race of a lifetime to finish second in the final of the 200 metres butterfly at the Olympics, just 0.03 seconds behind Spaniard Mireia Belmonte.
But don’t tell Groves she ‘only’ came second.
The euphoria in her post-race interview made it clear that she couldn’t have been happier with her performance, a personal best.
If Groves had found 0.03 seconds, her swim would have been remembered for decades as a triumph of the underdog, a victory nobody saw coming.
Instead, it feels her legacy will be the ‘almost girl’, the one who produced a sensational swim in the Olympics, but didn’t quite get gold. Silver is terrific, but gold is better.
Groves lacks the public profile of a James Magnussen or an Emily Seebohm. They will at least be remembered for their failure to live up to expectation in London.
Australian sporting history has no place for Groves’ second place in Rio. It will be overshadowed by the victory of Kyle Chalmers and Mack Horton, and the failure of Seebohm and McEvoy, should they not live up to their favourites tag by the end of the meet.
Winning is the only rhetoric that exists in dialogue surrounding swimming in Australia. It is all about winning or a failure to win. Silver doesn’t figure into this – just ask Alicia Coutts, she won five medals in the ‘failure’ of London.
As a nation, Australia needs to shift away from gold medal performances as a marker of success, and instead examine results in their broader contexts.
Yes, Maddie Groves ‘only’ got silver, but a year ago she was an unknown swimmer, who has risen from ninth at the 2015 world championships to silver at the Olympics.
If that isn’t an achievement to be proud of for a nation, I don’t know what is.
Simoc
Guest
Rory is mistaking the media hype for people. The people know. The clueless bozos in Channel 7 would still be punting on Geoff Hugill except he isn't in the team. They are collectively thick but need to create a great wave to hold down their jobs. Magnusson only missed out on gold by a little finger last time around and they seemed to think that is a fail. We seem to have a better class of commentators at this Olympics so far. The Australian Olympic admin bludgers need gold to get the government handout that pays out money so they can keep their snouts in the trough. They're past failures but feed the media hype.
Chris Kettlewell
Roar Guru
A good example is today. The Campbell sisters in the 100m Freestyle. Cate specifically "should" win. She's the world record holder having set that earlier this year. However, in the semi's, despite lowering the Olympic record again, the 16 year old Canadian was just 1/100th behind her. Now, if Cate comes out this morning and swims slower than her semi-final swim and loses, that will be disappointing. If she gets even faster, even going close to her own WR time, but this 16 year old Canadian just swims the race of her life and beats her anyway, then it's not a case of being disappointed that Cate couldn't win, but just have to give props to the girl who was able to beat her. I think that's what it comes down to a lot of the time. If you pull out your best when it counts, and someone else is just able to go even better, then there's nothing to be disappointed about. But if you lost to a time that you've bettered several times recently, then that's disappointing.
Chris Kettlewell
Roar Guru
I think a lot of it comes down to how well they performed. If you do a big PB and come second that's awesome. If you came second where the time you swam in the semi-final would have comfortably won the Gold but you couldn't put it together when it counted then you are going to be disappointed. That's only natural. As for Silver. I thought it was awesome. She Madeline was the one who finally won that first elusive silver medal. After getting to this point with no silver medals, having 2 in the one day was really good. Just imagine if she'd got gold and the 4x200 team got bronze. Then we'd still have been stuck with just gold and bronze on the medal table. Instead it's now looking much more balanced with some nice silver medals in there! :-) Obviously everyone wants to win. But getting an Olympic silver medal is a pretty amazing achievement that she will have forever, and she's still pretty young and may well come back in 4 years and be even better. I thought the criticism of Magnussen at London was over the top. He wasn't able to manage his best time in the final, but it was still a really good time, and he just lost by 1/100th of a second to get silver. That time was actually fractionally faster than Chalmers gold winning time at this Olympics to put it into some perspective. In comparison McEvoy's final time was over a second slower than his best from the Aussie trials and he finished 7th. But he won't get slammed like Magnussen did because Kyle won the race, plus we've have so many more gold medals, than we did then, plus the fact he's seen as such a nice guy. But in reality, his performance here was significantly worse than Magnussen at London. In 2012, Australia actually won pretty close to the amount of medals we thought we might win, just continually got touched out by others and had to settle for silver or bronze instead of Gold.