At the 2011 World Junior Championships in Lima, Peru, Australian hopeful Cameron McEvoy made three sprint freestyle podiums: gold in the 50 and 100m, and bronze in the 200m.

A year later, he made his Olympic debut at the London 2012 Games and raced in the heats of the 4x100 and 4x200 free. He was 18 - and there were no medals to reflect his growing stature in senior waters, the Dolphins fourth in the 4x100 0.22sec shy of the podium in a race topped by France's revenge on the defenders the USA, and fifth in the 4x200 0.7sec shy of bronze in a race topped by the third of four Olympic golds for American quartets that included Michael Phelps.

Four years on, McEvoy would approach the Rio 2016 Olympics as favourite for the 100m free title at Phelps' swan song Games. The Australian lived a day of steep challenge: seventh, the prize and podium well and truly beyond his reach yet in his hand a coin with two golden sides, one visible, the other a hidden promise of a better day if he could find a way to persevere and rise again.

What we witnessed in Rio was McEvoy waiting patiently on deck for his teenage teammate Kyle Chalmers so that he could hold aloft the arm of the new champion and the first Dolphin to claim the blue-riband title since Mike Wenden halted American rivals for the 100 and 200m crowns in 1968.

It was an act of grace from McEvoy that would serve as the first step down a new path to his own great and golden outcome eight long years on at Paris 2024 in the 50m free. Perspective has played a huge part in the narrative of McEvoy's career: he could have simply walked away, moved on to her fine chances in life, but the Griffith University physics and mathematics graduate who at Rio 2016 wore a swim cap with the signal of two merging black holes to celebrate the first observation of gravitational waves that had been announced two months before the Games, is wired differently.

Perseverance: persistence in doing something despite difficulty or delay in achieving success.