Apparently the La Défense Arena pool is not fast because it is too shallow? Pan Zhanle didn’t get the memo.
As a curtain to a completely crazy evening of swimming punctuated by the historic double of Léon Marchand, the first victory of the extraordinary Swede Sara Sjöstrom (30 years old) in the 100 m freestyle, the furious 1500 m of the American Katie Ledecky (Olympic record erased) and what else, the 19 year old Chinese delivered a performance that will be talked about for years in the 100 m freestyle, Wednesday.
By completing the round trip in 46.40 seconds, Pan not only smashed his own world record set in February by four tenths, he relegated his closest pursuer, the Australian Kyle Chalmers, who is not an “anvil” to use the expression of one coach, to more than a second (47.48).
The same goes for the young Romanian prodigy David Popovici (47.49), the previous world record holder who had to settle for bronze in the main swimming event.
Not bad for a crawler – who apparently trains like a distance athlete – who came within six hundredths of a second of elimination in the heats. The “flying fish”, as he is known in his homeland’s media, has thus secured China’s first gold medal in swimming at the Paris Olympics.
In the wake of the case of 23 swimmers testing positive before the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 – Pan was not part of the group, unlike 11 of his teammates – his performance is sure to stir up tension in the swimming world. Anti-doping authorities probably tried to prevent the blow by carrying out no less than 200 tests in ten days during the Chinese preparation camp in France.