Paris: On the first night of swimming events at the Paris La Defence Arena, people were headed just one way from the nearby metro. The Americans made their presence felt in number and noise. A few Aussies were around too.

“Are you ready for some swimming?” a volunteer by the entrance announced through a megaphone.

You bet they were. A woman in her 60s, trudging along the stands with a walking stick in tow, had flown all the way from New York. “I’m here for Ledecky,” she said.

So were a fair few more. Inside the massive arena built with 600 aluminium and glass scales that was nearly packed to capacity, the announcer played to the gallery. Katie Ledecky was lined up as the last to hit the lane and even before her name was called out, the most resounding roar of the evening had surfaced in anticipation. By then the cheer for Ariarne Titmus, the penultimate finalist to head out, had begun to drown.

In the water, she’d dominate.

Billed as the race of these Games, this year, decade and century even, it was the most anticipated chapter in the famed Titmus-Ledecky rivalry. The rip-roaring rise of Canadian teen Summer Mcintosh scribbled another fascinating sidenote to the 400m freestyle that has seen world record times oscillate between these three women over the last decade.

What it did turn out to be, the moment Titmus touched the wall, was a confirmation of the coronation. The “same old goofy Tassie girl”, as Tasmanian likes to call herself, marked another stamp of gold to her growing greatness. The towering American figure and a bona fide great was confined to bronze. Summer’s spring time had arrived with a silver touch, at age 17.

Titmus defended her 400m freestyle Tokyo Olympics gold in Paris, slipping further away from Ledecky’s reach. She led the race from start to finish, from first split to the last and finished at 3:57:49. Ledecky, owner of seven Olympic and 21 World Championship gold medals until then, came third, a position the 27-year-old moved to from fourth after the 200m split. Announcing her arrival in Tokyo with a fourth-place finish at 14, Mcintosh challenged Titmus here, yet second it was for the Canadian. The first, undisputed and ahead by almost a body length at the final stretch, stood Titmus.

Out she came of the water and there she waved at the crowd, the unassuming Australian turning into the darling of Paris on a buzzing Saturday night.

“I can’t really believe that’s me, to be honest,” Titmus told reporters in the mixed zone after defending her 400m gold. “I just look at myself and I’m so normal — I just love swimming, love getting out and representing our country and having fun.”

How about this for some more fun? From the 2019 World Championships stretching to the 2021 Olympics, 2022 Commonwealth Games and 2023 Worlds leading into the Paris Games, Titmus hasn’t been defeated in a 400m freestyle final.

It hasn’t been all fun and swim. Last September, doctors discovered a large growth on her right ovary while she was recovering from a hip injury. At 23, as an elite athlete and a woman who’d “give up anything in the world to be a mother”, she stood at a crossroad.

The surgery though was successful, and soon and sure enough, Titmus was back in the pool.

And thus returned the rivalry chatter. Ledecky, the 400m freestyle 2016 Rio Games champion who became so while breaking the world record, saw her Olympic gold and the world record snatched by the fast-rising Titmus in 2021 and 2022.

The two have been at each other in shaving off fractions of seconds to their respective timings to outdo the other since. Ledecky has asked, Titmus has answered. Mcintosh joined in as the wonder teen, breaking Titmus’s record in March 2023 before the Aussie stepped up to reclaim it four months later. All along, they believe they’ve only pushed each to unlock new doors of greatness.

“Any time I get to race either of those girls it’s an amazing opportunity and I learn so much. They push me to be better and make me put my best foot forward,” McIntosh said.

“It’s fun racing the best in the world. It gets the best out of me, it gets the best out of them,” Titmus said. “I really hope all the hype lived up to the expectation. I really hope that I put on a good show tonight and everyone enjoyed it.”

Ledecky — who won her eighth individual Olympic medal, tying Carl Lewis and Ray Ewry in the American honours list topped by Michael Phelps — too did. Except perhaps for the last bit when she was asked to take a selfie of the three on the podium. “I was joking with them (that) you’re going to get the oldest person a phone to figure out how to open it up and click the right button? Hopefully the photo turned out.”

It certainly did. So did the race.

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