Swimming: Much wiser if not much older, the mis-firing Missile has been re-launched – and is well and truly  back on target.

James Magnussen, the marquee star of the Australian swimming team, returned to the pool on Day 4 to put the shock failure of the 100m relay team behind him and to get stuck into the main mission, the 100m individual race, the blue-ribbon event of the Olympic program but a drought area for Australia for 44 years.

Atonement is at hand after he qualified fastest for the final after winning his semi-final in a smart 47.63 seconds. He will now start favourite in the race he has seemed destined to win ever since his breakthrough world championship triumph last year.

It has been a massive turnaround in the space of 48 hours – if only he had swum that time on Sunday night the relay gold medal might have been salvaged and all the angst avoided.

“If I can win this tomorrow night it will be for the boys in the relay team,” he said. One of those team-mates, James Roberts, failed to qualify for the individual final, finishing sixth in the same semi.

Magnussen emerged from the pool with a huge grin, saying: “It’s a relief, more than anything, just to remember what it feels like to go fast. It’s so much easier when I’m going faster than when I’m struggling.

“I felt really good tonight and feel like I’ve got a lot left in the tank. I’m happy.”

Asked what had turned things around, he said he had tried to have a more positive outlook. “I haven’t read any media or looked at social media, just concentrating on the swim.

“I want this pretty bad and I’m just going to do what I have to do.

“It’s a big confidence booster. I’ve been a bit out of sorts but I’ve learned so much. Everyone says it and I hear it all the time – the Olympics are a different ball game. That’s the truth.”

He admitted that for the first time he had doubted his ability to get the job done. “That’s something I haven’t done in my whole career. I’ve always been so confident.

“I came into the Olympics thinking I couldn’t be beaten. Its probably the reality check i needed. I have learned from it and I’m moving forward.”

Earlier Magnussen had finished second in his heat and qualified fourth-fastest for the semis behind pacesetter Nathan Adrian, the American who put him to the sword in the first leg of the  relay. Nathan won the other semi but was 0.,34 sec slower.

Seldom do mere first-round heats command such an intense spotlight when you’re the world champion. It’s supposed to be mere routine, almost match practice. Occasionally it’s just as watchable at the back end as the amateurs from non swimming nations dip their toes in the water, a la Eric the Eel. Sure enough, there was one Beni Bertrand Binobagira, 23, from Burundi, a small land-locked nation in East Africa, bringing up the rear in 1:04.57, almost 17 seconds off the pace.

  For Magnussen, though, there was no light relief about this preliminary skirmish, nothing to take for granted.  Even the official preview notes distributed to the world’s media shouted out that his chances of following last year’s world championship victory with Olympic gold were now in “some doubt” after his mediocre relay swim.

Magnbussen and Roberts had spent the day after the relay debriefing and re-loading. Magnussen said he and his coach Brant Best “spent a lot of time one on one just talking about what went wrong and how I can handle the siutaion a little bit better, what sort of things need work.”

So what did go wrong? Nerves, pure and simple, it would seem – with perhaps a bit of over-eagerness flavouring the mix.

“Yeah, I didn’t sleep for a couple of days leading up to the event, my hands were shaking and my heart was beating through my shirt,” Magnussen, adding in the next breath that “it wasn’t that I was nervous.”

He said that having come through his first preparation for years that has been free of sickness or other interruptions, he had become excited about what he was about to do, how fast he was going to swim. “I just let it get to me,” he said.

Magnussen has rarely tasted defeat, not in recent times anyway, and, naturally, didn’t enjoy the experience.

“It hurt my pride as much as anything,” he said. “A lot of my competitors have never seen me lose or falter like that. They probably think they can beat me now. But I’m going to really fight for this one. I want it pretty bad.” 

Ron Reed in London
Olympics.com.au