Elijah Winnington and Sam Short are doing what no one else has for 20 years, pushing each other to Paris 2024 qualification and possibly gold and silver in seven weeks.
A couple of fundamental traits set one race apart from the other. The most notable was that Ian Thorpe did not fall into the pool. Being 41 now instead of 21 and long retired, he was safely ensconced on deck with a broadcast microphone in hand.ultimately became Australia’s first Olympic men’s 400m freestyle one-two, the country got a good look at what their next Thorpe-Grant Hackett power pair might look like.
Both have swum markedly quicker than that this year, and the fact that this box-ticking result felt somewhat underwhelming only further conveys the anticipation following these two to their first Olympics in the same pool. “That’s what Sam and I always do,” Winnington said on the opening night of the Australian trials. “I think for the past three or four 400m freestyle finals we’ve been in together, it’s been like 0.3 or something apart every single time. So we always fight and we always race each other.”The swimming set would call this a ding-dong battle, and the Short-Winnington match-up has more a bit more mongrel about it than the greats who came before them.
Twenty-four-year-old Winnington, the 2022 world champion, placed seventh in the Tokyo 2020 400m freestyle final. At the trials, a then 18-year-old Short posted a qualifying time of 3:46.33 but placed fifth, with Jack McLoughlin taking the second ticket and going on to claim silver. But in April 2023 at the Australian Swimming Championships, Short clocked the 10th-fastest 400m freestyle time in history with a 3:42.46 that would have won him Olympic gold.
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