After gymnastics, archery and pistol shooting, the focus tonight will shift to swimming as India competes in its first aquatic event at the Rio Olympics.
At 10 pm tonight, Kerala boy Sajan Prakash will compete in one of the most hotly contested events in at Rio 2016 – the men’s 200-meter butterfly stroke. As a Universality Place selection, Prakash lacks the competitive edge in this event. Prakash failed to make it into the A category which features a lower and more demanding cut-off time for qualification to the Olympics, but did make the higher B time, as a result of which he was selected as a wild card entry into the competition. And as luck (or a lack of it) would have it, it’s the one event featuring the greatest Olympian of all time – Michael Phelps.
In what will surely be a huge boost for the morale of the young international swimmer, Sajan Prakash will compete with both Phelps and Prakash’s closest competitor in the butterfly, Chad le Clos. Yesterday, le Clos swam the freestyle of the men’s 200-meter and managed a comfortable place in the finals with a rank of five, while Phelps won gold with the U.S. men at the 4x100 meter free relay.
The 200-meter butterfly is an event with which Michael Phelps has a fraught relationship in spite of being the Olympic record holder in it. He narrowly missed out on winning it in the London Olympics, leaving the South African le Clos with a win which even le Clos was wildly surprised by. In the same event is the Hungarian Laszlo Cseh, who qualified for the Olympics with the fastest time of the event and managed to beat gold medallist le Clos at it, at the 2015 World Championships.
Sajan is placed in the first heat with other B time swimmers and will therefore not share the pool with the famous names; le Clos is on the second, Phelps on the third, and Cseh on the fourth heat. However, only the fastest 16 swimmers across the four heats will make it to the semi-finals.
Also Read: Rio Olympics 2016: Can Sajan Prakash swim against the high tide at the Games?
With his left-of-centre position on lane three, Prakash will have a clear view of his competitors. With a selection time of 1:59.27, Prakash has a wide gap of over two seconds with his fellow B-time competitors Robert Zbogar (Slovenia) and Simon Sjodin (Sweden). A win in his own heat would give him a solid chance of progressing to the semis in an event which is almost unduly star-studded.
Sajan, however, is having quite the time at Rio and has been getting acquainted with stars just fine.
