Geoff Huegill

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Skippy Geoff Huegill makes it the best race of his life

• · Wayne Smith
• · From:The Australian
• · October 09, 2010 12:00

EIGHT years after he won his last Commonwealth title, Geoff Huegill did it all for himself and his country last night.

• It also came six years after any male Australian swimmer last won an individual Olympic or Commonwealth Games gold medal.
• It’s statistically true that the man they call Skippy swam the best race of his life in the 100m butterfly final. His time, 51.69sec, was easily the fastest he has ever swum and astonishingly places him, at 31, second in the world this year behind the greatest swimmer of all time, American Michael Phelps.
• But the glowing numbers on the electronic scoreboard weren’t required to calibrate the worth of this swim.
• Here he was, possibly at the crossroads of his career, possibly at the end, facing the Kenyan swimmer who in recent times has become his nemesis, Jason Dunford, the man who beat him for the 50m butterfly gold two nights ago.
• Lose and retirement became his most likely course of action, win and suddenly the 2012 London Olympics wouldn’t look quite so far away.
• From the moment he exited the blocks in 0.65sec, the fastest any swimmer in the field got into action, Huegill was a man on a mission. Realising that if he could be up with sprint specialist Dunford at the turn, he would have the staying power to bring it home, he turned barely .03sec behind his arch-rivals.
• From that moment, the last 50m turned into a victory lap as Huegill stretched his wings and showed why he has been compared with the legends of his stroke, Pablo Morales and Mary T. Meagher.
• In the end, he pulled away, leaving his nearest rivals, Papua New Guinean Ryan Pini and England’s Anthony James – the joint silver medallists – trailing almost a full second behind in his wake, with Dunford, his job as the race rabbit seemingly done, fading to fourth. The weight off Huegill’s mind as he pumped the air in triumph was surely the equal of the weight he has shed from his waistline over the past three years – a massive 45kg. His incandescent smile lit up the pool. The most ambitious of comebacks had just yielded the most audacious and astonishing of dividends.
• “Look, it’s been awesome,” Huegill said.
• “I woke up today. I had a great sleep last night, almost nine hours and then a massage this morning and just felt good in the water.”
• He brought home more than the back end of the race. Just as importantly, he brought to an end the mystifying run of miserable results Australia’s male swimmers have had for most of the decade.
• It seems funny to talk of droughts in an aquatic sport, but there is no other way of describing the failure of Australia’s men to win a single Olympic or Commonwealth title since Grant Hackett’s epic 1500m freestyle victory at the 2004 Athens Olympics.
• “It just feels awesome,” Huegill said, when asked how he felt to have finally struck a blow for the underperforming men.
• “The men’s team is such a fantastic team. It just needed a couple of guys to really step up there and really be leaders.”
• It’s a measure of how in control Huegill is these days that he didn’t allow the emotion of the moment to sweep him into making a commitment to go on to London. But he did go close. “It’s definitely in the more favourable side, there’s no doubt about that,” he said

Australian swimmer Geoff Huegill completes a remarkable comeback at the 2010 Commonwealth Games. By Ian Thorpe Five-time Olympic gold medallist for Australia
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