Matt Richards has admitted he has re-run the 200 metres freestyle final at the Paris Olympics in his head “many, many, many times” after missing out on a gold medal by a fraction of a second.
The 22-year-old Briton won silver after finishing 0.02 seconds behind Romanian teenager David Popovici and, while that represented a major achievement, he still cannot help but reflect upon what might have been.
Asked how many times he had gone over that race in his mind, Richards replied: “Many, many, many times, probably more times than I could count, to be fair.
“But it’s one of those things where there’s good parts and bad parts. One one hand, you’ve won an Olympic silver individually; on the other hand, you’ve missed out on gold by two hundredths of a second, so there’s swings and roundabouts.
“But at the end of the day, that’s sport and I think there’s lessons to be learned on both sides of that coin, and parts of that I’ll try to take forward with me again into this summer and beyond.”
Richards will get another chance to race on the big stage at the World Aquatics Championships which get under way in Singapore next week and he will walk out with his appetite whetted by his near miss last summer.
He said: “I’m always going to go into races with the goal and, I suppose, the expected outcome of trying to win the race regardless of what’s happened in the previous race or somebody else’s previous race or what’s expected on paper. That’s always going to be my goal.
“A race like that, it’s always going to be one that sticks with you for good and bad reasons, but longer term, trying to put that right over the next few years and trying to turn that silver into gold is going to be the target.”
Richards will swim the 100m freestyle as well as the 200m in Singapore and, while the longer event remains his focus, he is confident there is more to come from him over two lengths of the pool.
He said: “I do think that the 100m, there’s a lot of potential there for me. I’ve got a lot of speed – I’m a 21 (second) swimmer on the 50m – but I’ve also got a real good engine on that 200m and I think, at some point, those two will come together really well and form a really strong 100m freestyle.”
