As the table shows, all eight teams selected breaststrokers for the second leg. Each country also wanted a female freestyler to anchor the team home.
Australia doesn’t have a world-class male backstroker, so were always going to pick McKeown. Yong has been swimming better this week than Sam Williamson in the breaststroke, while Matt Temple is Australia’s best butterfly swimmer, despite his disappointing seventh finish in his individual 100-metre event. That left Mollie O’Callaghan to bring it home.
Statistically, when you combine all the best times, Australia picked the right team. The next fastest would have been a McKeown-Yong-Ben Armbruster-O’Callaghan combination or a McKeown-Yong-Temple-Shayna Jack combination.
The early lead in the first leg
McKeown is the world’s fastest female backstroker – and arguably the greatest of all-time after her 100m and 200m gold medals in Paris – but was behind early as the USA’s Ryan Murphy and China’s Xu Jiayu zipped away.
The first lap of a …