W50 Free: Sjöström Saves Best For Fifth Games In Dash To Paris Double & Third Career Gold In 23.71
The first Swedish woman ever to claim Olympic gold in the pool where she took the 100m butterfly title in a World record at Rio 2016, is now the first Swedish woman to take Olympic gold in the 100 and the 50m freestyle
Sarah Sjöstrom is now officially the supreme sprinter of her era. That double of gold in the 50m freestyle in 23.71 to add to her victory in the 100m made the Swedish sprint queen the greatest sprinter of the 21st century.
In victory, Sjöström completed her most successful Olympic Games, the first Swedish woman ever to claim Olympic gold in the pool where she took the 100m butterfly title in a World record at Rio 2016, now the first Swedish woman to take Olympic gold in the 100 and the 50m freestyle.
Tokyo2020ne might have been a bigger staging post in Sjostrom's run of five Olympics since her debut at 14 in 2008 but Swedish weather intervened and the sprinter broke her elbow falling on the ice months out from the delayed Games.
No matter. Practice makes perfect. Having trialled sub-24sec swimming 40 times in her career, 22 of them inside 23.9 (she owns 46% of the top 100, over 60% of the top 50 and 80% of the top 10 all-time), today's win was in the bag as long as the 30-year-old kept a steady nerve.
She did. Her 23.71, 0.1sec shy of her own world record, marked the 11th sub-23.80 of her career in a world in which only Germany's Britta Steffen, in shiny suit in 2o09, and the 2016 Olympic dash champion Pernille Blume, of Denmark, have charted those waters.
Australian Meg Harris grabbed silver in 23.97, with China's Zhang Yufei, racing under a cloud of controversy over the 23 positives returned by Chinese swimmers iun 2021, took bronze in 24.30. =
Our main image tells the tale of of a towering trail of excellence on freestyle and butterfly. Sjostrom has won 52 international long-course titles for Sweden at Olympic (3), World (14) and European (17) levels.
Victory today made it 96 medals in all for her country win the biggest occasions of all, taking in the World and European short-course championships.
Two weeks shy of her 31st birthday, Sjöström can look back on a towering career. She came to prominence she she claimed the European 100m butterfly title at 14. A year later, beyond her Olympic debut in Beijing, she added her first World title in the same event.
Beyond the freestyle list in our main image and the 2016 Olympic 100m butterfly title that made her the first Swedish woman ever to claim Olympic gold in the pool, Sjöström has 10 World and 8 European long-course titles on 'fly.
More later...
Swedish Sprint Queen Celebrates Her Most Successful Games
All photos by Patrick B. Kraemer
