It's the eve of Los Angeles 2028. The Olympic record for the men's 100m freestyle is 46.40sec. It was set by Pan Zhanle for gold at the Paris 2024 Games as the first Chinese swimmer to hold the standard after he crushed his own 46.80 with an inscrutable performance a full body length up on the rest - just there and back.

In an event in which 0.3sec would represent a big-margin win, Pan trounced the best of the rest in the world by more than a second. The sport had not seen that happen since 1928, when Johnny Weissmuller's pioneering retention of the crown swung him on a fast liana to silver-screen fame as Tarzan.

Imagine that, 96 years had to go by before an Olympic 100m freestyle final was won by more than a second. We dissected specific aspects of the swim in part 1 of this two-parter:

Pandemonium In The Sprint Ranks: Dissecting An Inscrutable 46.40 - Part 1

In the tussle between those who roar out and hold on and those who hold fire and then spark when hunting down those who roar out, there had never been a swimmer capable of racing to the turn inside 22.5 and returning inside 24.5. There is one now - and how!

State Of Swimming +Craig Lord

Pan's blast was freakish, unexpected and soaked in questions that most other sprinters in the 50 and 100m finals in Paris responded to with phrases such as "it sets the bar higher for all of us" and "it'll be motivation for us to all step up to the new standard" etc etc.

We'll have a good handle on how that's all gone by the time the scoreboard reads out the result of the 100m in LA2028. Perhaps we'll see the home nation step up to the challenge and get two men from the high 47s down to low 46s. The pressure will certainly be on.

Or perhaps we'll see a picture that reminds us of the shiny suits saga and the wild celebrations that came with suggestions of 'see, it wasn't so bad' every time anyone got close, let alone actually broke the 2008-2009 standards.

In the second part of this analysis of an extraordinary, off-the-chart swim at the Paris Olympics, we consider just how big the drop was, and what Pan's Australian coach Denis Cotterell did and didn't say when explaining:

"Biochemists, real researchers, will analyse Pan, like they do every Olympic champion, because they want to see what the best are doing. And they will see that he is doing something different. It is unique to him. It is idiosyncratic."