David Popovici lost everything during 199 metres and won the gold in the last few centimetres of what he defined as a “dogfight”. The crowd gathered in the pavilion let out a unanimous gasp at the sight of the final commotion in the pool. There was something magical in the touch that decided the final of the 200-metre freestyle race held yesterday in the swimming championships of the Games. Something aesthetic, not because it was beautiful but because it was exciting in the primitive sense of aisthesis, that word that the prehistoric Greeks, founders of the Olympic movement, used to indicate the whole of sensitive life, inaccessible to reasoning but manifestly beautiful in the discourse of the body. It was no coincidence that the poetic Popovici, the most plastic swimmer in existence, won in an agonising and ineffable way in the turbulent pool of Paris, and thus climbed to the top of a podium where the best swimmers of all time have passed. A title that defines the giants of each era. Phelps, Thorpe, Van den Hoogenband, Spitz and Johnny Weissmüller, the latter also born in Romania and, like Popovici, Olympic champion in Paris, only exactly one hundred years ago.
Adrian Radulescu, his coach, was once asked if he had seen anything supernatural in the boy he met at the age of seven in a swimming pool in Bucharest. “Everyone in the group was better than David,” he said. “I told them: ‘You are going to swim 50m races. The last one is out.’ And he managed to finish second to last every time. He ended up swimming against the winner of all the races. In the last race David won, because he had conserved energy.”
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That’s Popovici. That’s how Popovici swam at La Défense, in a final that began with the dominance of the German Lukas Märtens, Olympic champion in the 400m, who came first in the 50m, 100m and 150m. He was followed by the British Matthew Richards, who was in lane one, close to the overflow, and who moved ahead in the second half of the race, together with the American Luke Hobson, who did what experienced swimmers do in university races. Hobson stuck to the lane separating his lane from Popovici’s and simply rode his wave. The vortices that Popovici generates in the water swept him into their whirlpool, saving him a lot of effort.
The eight swimmers turned almost in unison at the final wall, passing the 150 mark. Popovici, who had been doing his typical rhythmic swim of less than 30 stroke cycles per length, undulating on his belly like a dolphin rising and falling on the surface line, began to accelerate, as if sensing the threat advancing from all sides. “It was a dogfight,” he said, “the kind of race you have to fight down to the last hundredth of a second with every atom in our bodies. This could have been won by any one of us.”
The eight competitors in the final seemed to touch the last bar simultaneously. Popovici turned around, saw that he was first in 1m 44.72s, and grabbed his head as if he were feeling dizzy. Matthew Richards, the Briton, touched in 1m 44.74s, the American Luke Hobson in 1m 44.79s and Duncan Scott in 1m 44.87s. The intrepid Märtens finished fifth.
First I did it for the child in me, then for my friends and family, and then for Romania.”
“My idea was to do the first 100m a second faster, but I couldn’t,” said Popovici, stoic but dying of laughter inside, already in the conference room. “Who knows? It happened like this. Maybe it was for the best. Maybe if I had started faster I would have died in the last meters. We will never know. It’s over now and it was nice. I’m glad it turned out like this.”
An avid reader of the Stoics, Popovici sleeps next to a copy of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and has an unrivalled way of expressing himself, always in academically exact English, in pronunciation and in terms. He is only 19 years old and two years ago he became famous when he broke the absolute record for the 100m freestyle. Now, with the Olympic medal in the 200m in his possession, there is no longer any doubt that he is the best freestyle swimmer of his generation.
Popovici has established himself among the greatest, even though the time he set on Monday, 1 minute 44.72 seconds, corresponds to almost remote times, in line with those set at La Défense: probably the slowest Olympic pool of the century. Ian Thorpe swam that more than two decades ago. Popovici himself swam much faster at a meeting in Belgrade last month, where he clocked 1m 43.13s with hardly any opposition. A swim almost, compared to his fastest race, the 1m 42.97s at the 2022 European Championships in Rome, the third best time of all time and number one in the rankings for textile swimsuits.
“This is the first gold medal Romania has ever won in the men’s category,” he said when asked about Camila Potec and Diana Mocanu, his predecessors on the top of the Olympic podiums for his country in 2002 and 2000. “I am happy for the support I have had in Romania, but ultimately I did this for myself, for the child in me who always wanted this, for my friends and family, and also for my country, of course.”
The perfect swimmer simply doesn’t exist. No one is. Not even Michael Phelps. Phelps is the most decorated and the objectively best. But we’re all so far from perfection. The best we can do is chase perfection. That’s what I have in mind every time I train. Get close. But with the knowledge that I’ll never touch it.”
He didn’t smile once. He recalled the crisis he suffered last year, when he missed the 100m and 200m podiums at the World Championships in Fukuoka, and his eyes lit up when someone asked him to define the perfect swimmer. “In 2022 I rose to fame and started this new career, as a swimmer,” he recalled, “and in 2023 I had to adapt to this whole new life. This year, I finally enjoyed the gruelling training again. But I will never be the perfect swimmer. The perfect swimmer simply doesn’t exist. No one is. Not even Michael Phelps. Phelps is the most decorated and the objectively best. But we are all very far from perfection. The best we can do is chase perfection. That’s what I have in mind every time I train. Getting close to that perfection. But with the knowledge that I will never touch it.”
Meanwhile, Spaniard Hugo González de Oliveira, the best swimmer in his delegation, completed his first final in Paris yesterday, in the 100-meter backstroke. He finished sixth in a race won by Italian Thomas Ceccon in 52 seconds. China’s Xu Jiayu took silver and American Ryan Murphy, champion in 2016, took bronze with 52.39s. The Spaniard stopped the clock at 52.73 seconds, three hundredths of a second off his best time. Now he will focus on the 200 backstroke.
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