Time not on Clareburt’s side

Kiwi ace fades to seventh in final

Lewis Clareburt knew he wasn’t a morning person. He just didn’t expect, in his words, the piano to fall that hard.

After a few hours to digest his startling fade at the Tokyo Aquatics Centre yesterday, after a mighty first 350m of his first Olympic swimming final, Clareburt simply put it down to body clocks.

The 22-year-old from Wellington just didn’t adjust as well to the 10.30am (local time) 400m individual medley final when he led at the halfway point then faded to seventh, 15 hours after he was secondfastest qualifier in a personal best of 4min 09.49sec.

Thanks to US television networks, who pay the bulk of the mammoth rights cheque to the International Olympic Committee, swimming finals at prime time in the US are non-negotiable. It means the reverse of the usual worldwide routine: heats in the morning and finals the same night.

‘‘It’s always hard getting up in the morning and racing fast. I’ve found in the past it’s tough getting up and feeling ready. This morning I got up at 5.30am and did everything I could to try and get over that morning blues,’’ Clareburt said in a Zoom conference.

‘‘It was tough ... last night’s heat was all about the time and this morning was just about racing. You could see everyone’s times were slower, and everyone has the morning blues and I guess it affected me more than everyone else in that final 50m. That was where the piano fell.’’

From leading eventual gold medallist Chase Kalisz at the halfway mark, to trailing him by just 1.82sec in the silver medal position with 50m to swim, Clareburt faded fast, even if the leaders hardly smashed the clock either. His time of 4:11.22 was still his fastest in a morning swim, but well off Kalisz’s 4:09.42, US silver medallist Jay Litherland’s 4:10.28 and Australian Brendon Smith’s 4:10.38 for bronze. So, what about that piano? ‘‘My lungs were pretty much gone, the body was freezing up and the lactic [acid], it hits you pretty rough. That’s the easiest way to explain it, the piano falls and you go with it.’’

Clareburt was shattered in the immediate aftermath, having looked a huge chance of being New Zealand’s first Olympic swimming medallist in 25 years since Danyon Loader’s double gold in Atlanta. He arrived in Tokyo among the world’s fastest this year, and with a 2019 world championships bronze to his name.

Clareburt sought solace from Moss Burmester back in New Zealand. Burmester knows the feeling well: he swam a morning Olympic final in Beijing in 2008, shot out of the blocks in the 200m butterfly against the great Michael Phelps and faded late to fourth.

‘‘I’m good now. That first few hours after the race was definitely tough. I was warming down and I saw the medal ceremony happen and it was pretty hard to see those guys on the podium and me not.

‘‘I was messaging [Burmester] and he said ‘you’ve just got to get over it’. He got fourth in Beijing and he said ‘you’ve just got to move on, nothing anyone says is going to help so you’ve just got to swallow the pill and get over it’.’’

It showed Clareburt again how everything has to go exactly right to climb the podium in such a competitive sport. Loader, Anthony Mosse, Paul Kingsman and Jean Stewart remain the country’s only Olympic individual swimming medallists.

Clareburt was amazed at the flood of goodwill messages he’d received from New Zealand, and said this steeled his resolve, with the next Olympics just three years away in Paris.

First there’s Clareburt’s secondary event in Tokyo, the 200m IM, with heats on Wednesday night.