Underdog Dolphins? To some extent, but fair to say that if any team was likely to produce a leaper with a split faster than Pan Zhanle's, it was Australia, courtesy of Kyle Chalmers.

It certainly played out along those lines, and no, short of an invasion of privacy, we're not going to know where the balance of the losses and gains of 'gastro' woe lay or to whom the United States squad the 'enteritis' applied.

Under any circumstance, it seemed as though Flynn Southam, Kai Taylor and Max Giuliani would still have an Andean slope to climb to crack the mighty Americans and cope with the Italians.

All things that needed to line up joined the dots nicely and neatly for a Dolphins quartet that hardly, of at all, put a stroke wrong on there way to a 3:08.97 victory that established a Championship, Commonwealth, Oceania and Australia record.

The medal-winning teams, Italy taking silver and the United States bronze, lined-up one 47-point after another, with no-one over that number and only one under it: Chalmers, who entered the fray in third place 0.2sec behind the Italians and a thumping 0.74sec adrift the Americans.

What happened next? Here we go...