In the past 33 years, on only three occasions had an individual athlete managed to claim at least five gold medals at a single Olympic Games. All of those three occasions belonged to the legendary Michael Phelps, who won six in Athens in 2004, eight in Beijing four years later, and another five in Rio in 2016. This year, in an edition of the Games which for a long time seemed as though it might never happen, Dressel joined that illustrious club.
How he did it
The 24-year-old headed to Tokyo, his second trip to the Olympics, having won one gold medal in his life – which he achieved back in 2016 alongside Phelps in the 4×100-metre freestyle relay. Since then he has established himself as one of, if not the, best swimmers in the world, but he needed to frank that form with a few more gold medals. As the man himself said in the wake of his historic effort in Tokyo, ‘your whole life boils down to a moment that will take 20-40 seconds’, and if he couldn’t perform in that time then he could easily have been resigned to career of what-ifs.
But perform he did. He started it off by again winning the 4×100-metre freestyle relay, this time alongside Blake Pieroni, Bowe Becker and Zach Apple. Two days later, he won his first ever individual gold medal in the 100-metre freestyle, beating out the 2016 winner, Australian Kyle Chalmers, by just 0.06 seconds and setting a new Olympic record in the process. He went on to break the world record in the 100-metre butterfly final en route to gold another couple of days later, before he finished the meet with victories in the 50-metre freestyle (another Olympic record) and the 4×100-metre medley relay (another world record). The only event he entered which he didn’t win was the 4×100-metre mixed medley relay, in which the USA team finished in fifth place.
Shoulders wide enough to handle plenty of expectation
It was an historic few days for the man from Florida, and the exuberance with which he celebrated his fifth gold after relatively understated response to the previous four highlighted just how important the results were to him. There’s no doubt that he entered the Games with plenty of expectations on his sizeable shoulders; at the 2017 World Championships he won seven gold medals, while he won six more to go with a couple of silvers at the 2019 edition of the same meeting. But alas, he had still won just one gold medal – and a team one at that – at the biggest sporting competition in the world, and an unexpectedly poor performance in Tokyo would have raised question marks over the legacy he will ultimately leave.
Of course, it’s hardly his fault that he had only won a single gold prior to Tokyo – he was only 19 years of age at the 2016 Rio Olympics, and it’s hardly a black mark against any athlete to have not yet accumulated the bulk of their accolades at that age. But having turned 24 back in August of this year, his time was now – by the time the next Olympics come around he will be 27, an age at which he will likely still be more than capable of competing at his best, but given many swimmers reach their peak closer to their early-mid twenties, there’s no doubt Dressel would have felt the heat in Tokyo in more ways than one.
Dominance under the surface
Throughout the course of his historically successful week at these Olympics, Dressel separated himself from the pack most notably through his extraordinary underwater skills. In virtually every race in which he swam, he flew off the blocks like a proverbial rocket, regularly surfacing with close to a one length lead over the chasing pack, the rest of the swimmers separated by barely a head.
Never was this more evident than in the 100-metre freestyle event in which he defeated Chalmers by little more than a fingertip. In that race, Dressel developed a clear early advantage over the Australian – as well as the rest of the field – which was slowly whittled down over the course of the first 50 metres. On the turn, the 24-year-old once again re-established a significant lead over the chasers courtesy of an extraordinary 15 metres in which he more closely resembled the dolphin after which the underwater kick is named than the human which he is. Chalmers came hard in the remainder of the race and had there been another five metres to go may have won, but the distinct superiority Dressel displayed both off the blocks and on the turn proved to be too much for his opponents to reel in, even in spite of superior swims on top of the water.
A little over a week ago, there was huge pressure on Dressel’s shoulders to deliver in Tokyo. Five gold medals later, he is sitting on top of the world of swimming, having established himself as the greatest swimmer on the planet. He might not be able to get near the extraordinary 23 gold medals which Phelps won throughout the course of his illustrious career – it’s quite possible that nobody ever will – but after his superb performance in Tokyo, he is well on the way to establishing himself as one of the world’s greatest ever Olympians.
