Through the year I find escape in watching tennis played in all manners of tournaments. But I’ve always been uneasy about the idea of tennis at the Olympic Games. Winning a gold medal at the Games ought to represent the pinnacle of sport. But for a tennis player this isn’t ostensibly the case. Neither Roger Federer nor Novak Djokovic has won a singles gold medal and yet this has scarcely discounted their greatness in any way. It’s perhaps for this reason that I’ve never really looked forward to the Games because the tennis was on. If I wanted to see Nadal, Henin, Williams or Graf at their best, I’d rather have seen them at a regular tour event than at the Olympics.
The Games, for me, has always been a time to see what one sees very little of in the intervening period. It has involved taking delight in seeing Yelena Isinbayeva compete against no one other than herself in Beijing, seeing Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt at the acme of their powers, seeing Hicham El Guerrouj power his way to gold in the 1,500m, and 5,000m races in Athens, seeing the graceful Jonathan Edwards do the triple jump in Sydney, and seeing Cathy Freeman win the 400m gold in front of her home crowd. If I were to go further back, to some of my earliest memories of the Games, from Atlanta 1996, I’d go to Alexander Popov’s blistering 50m freestyle swim or to Michael Johnson’s historic 200m and 400m double, and not to Andre Agassi’s gold—or for that matter Leander Paes’ bronze—in the tennis.
I like tennis too much to completely eschew it from my attention. In Tokyo, I’ve caught glimpses of Djokovic, Osaka and Medvedev play. But the most exhilarating moment of the Games so far has come in the swimming pool, in the women’s 400m freestyle.
America’s Katie Ledecky went into the event as the defending champion and as the world record holder. But she started the day knowing that Australia’s Ariarne Titmus had been faster than her over the distance all year long. The race, when it happened, didn’t disappoint. For 300m, Ledecky lead, and at one point, in the third leg, she led by a whole body length. But then Titmus closed the gap down and chased her down in the most thrilling of finishes.
The contest, Titmus v. Ledecky, isn’t anywhere near finished. They’ll be up against each other in the 200m freestyle, in the 4 x 200m relay, and likely in the 800m freestyle too. Ledecky won gold in each of those events last time around in Rio de Janeiro. Can she now repeat the act?