Monday, August 11, 2008

The Lezak Factor

I hope some of you sucked it up and stayed up late to watch what I can only describe as the most exhilarating swimming relay event I've ever seen in my life - the men's 4x100m free relay. Let's set the stage. The French team was favored for the win, and a quote from the 100m world record holder (Pepe LePew or something) read something like this: "The Americans? We're going to smash them..."

The first leg sees Michael Phelps touch in about 3rd position, but in a PB 47.5 seconds. Some other kid then swims another PB to pull back some time, but they are not in the lead still. Cullen Jones, aka Terence Baptiste, is third and swims a little slower than he is capable of. Jason Lezak is now 3/4 of a body length (.8 seconds) behind Pepe LePew at the start of the final leg. He appears to have no chance at the turn, but rides the monster wake Pepe is creating, and with 30m to go it looks possible.

So with desperation rife through the pool for the American's gold medal hopes, how does Jason Lezak respond? Only with a fastest-ever relay split (46.06) and an 8/100th of a second victory over the French.

Completely amazing, and for this reason Jason Lezak is this week's Purple Drink Athlete of the Week. If you haven't noticed, the Olympics are on for the next two weeks. I'd say unless any of you does something completely amazing in this time, you probably won't win. Haha.

I'll post a reminder tomorrow as well, but we are meeting at GILMAN tomorrow for track, at 6:30, we'll do a BRIEF warmup on the track before leaving at 6:45 to run down to Robert E Lee for some hills.

Couple of race performances to note: Thursday's 5000m on the track results are on the right hand side, I'll look for results from yesterday's trail race and also we need Ben's recap from his 6k.

1 comment:

Rebs said...

if this Olympic moment can be eclipsed by anything else in Beijing I would be surprised. Freaking awesome.