Australia’s super-charged golden girls – Mollie O’Callaghan, Shayna Jack, Brianna Throssell and Ariarne Titmus – have won gold medal number nine for the Dolphins in the 4x200m freestyle relay in Fukuoka – smashing their own world record set at last year’s Birmingham Commonwealth Games by 1.79 seconds – with Aussies on the verge of their greatest ever world championships.

The dominant Dolphins – all from the same St Peters Western Swim Club in Queensland, lowered the world record to 7:37.50 to swim away from a brave US foursome who took silver in 7.41.38 with Olympic champions China winning bronze in 7:44.40.

The unstoppable Aussies were led off by reigning world champion and world record holder O’Callaghan in 1:53.66 – 0.81 outside her individual world mark and the sixth fastest time ever swum in a relay.

And they were brought home by a barnstorming Titmus, second to O’Callaghan in last night’s individual final, in the fastest ever relay split – the triple Olympic champion splitting 1:52.41 – 0.41 faster than she anchored the team home in Birmingham.

 

Throughout the eight days of racing at the World Championships, American swimmers struggled to reach the top of the podium, with their total of seven marking the fewest by a U.S. team since winning just four at the 1994 edition of Worlds. However, the overall U.S. tally in the medal count was never in doubt, with the team’s 38 top-three finishes matching the 2017 American team for the second-most medals in World Championships history.

The multitude of podium finishes and finals performances secured the title of Team of the Meet for the United States. At the conclusion of the last session of racing in Fukuoka, World Aquatics presented the award to the four American captains, Ryan Murphy and Nic Fink for the men’s team and Abbey Weitzeil and Leah Smith for the women’s.

The U.S. team secured the award by saving the best for last, winning three gold medals and seven medals overall on the final night. Hunter Armstrong and Justin Ress opened the session with a 1-2 finish in the men’s 50 backstroke before Lilly King earned silver in the women’s 50 breaststroke. In arguably the most exciting race of the meet, Bobby Finke won silver in the men’s 1500 free, smashing his own American record by five seconds while finishing merely five hundredths behind gold medalist Ahmed Hafnaoui.

 

Has Australia ever performed at such a high level at a major swimming competition? Perhaps in 2001, at the first World Championships held in Fukuoka, Japan, when the team had 13 gold medals. That meet was the signature performance of the legendary Ian Thorpe, who set world records in the 200, 400 and 800 freestyle while anchoring three gold-medal relays for Australia. Grant Hackett set a 1500 free world record that would last a decade while Petria Thomas swept the women’s 100 and 200 butterfly.

In swimming’s return to Fukuoka this week, the Aussies were arguably better. The meet started with a bang as Australia won four gold medals on night one, and the momentum continued from there.

Just like 2001, there were 13 gold medals and once again six different individuals earning gold. But instead of winning just three silver and three bronze medals in 2001, this Australian group collected seven silver and five bronze for 25 in total, the Aussies’ largest total-medal tally ever at a global-level competition. Twenty-three of those medals came in individual events, surpassing the 21 medals the Dolphins won at the Tokyo Games while also earning four additional golds. So what Australia had merely two individual world records this time?

As Leon Marchand pursued history, Carson Foster did his best to stay close to his French rival. Through the halfway point of the men’s 400 IM final, Foster was close to Marchand, although it was clear to everyone watching that Marchand’s superior breaststroke leg would soon leave Foster in the dust. He fell one second behind after one length of breaststroke, then by more than three seconds by the time then men turned to freestyle.

Head-to-head, Foster is evenly matched or slightly better than Marchand on freestyle. But not three seconds better. And sitting a further three seconds ahead of the field, he had nowhere to go, up or down. Seemingly on pace to crush his best time of 4:06.56, he ended up matching the time from last year’s Worlds to the hundredth as Marchand went on to annihilate Michael Phelps’ 15-year-old world record of 4:03.84.

Foster secured a silver medal in that race, as high a finish as he could have realistically hoped for, but his remaining two individual swims did not produce those same results. Seeded first heading into the 200 butterfly final, Foster turned second or third at each intermediate split. He was never going to catch Marchand, but silver or bronze looked well within his reach. Instead, his last 50 was a painful 31.06, by far the slowest in the field, as he faded to sixth, his time of 1:54.74 almost a full second off his semifinal time.