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Phelps buoyed, Lochte dejected after silver-medal performance in relay

By Vahe Gregorian, St. Louis Post-Dispatch –

LONDON — Michael Phelps’ resurgent and reassuring performance Sunday at the Olympic Aquatics Center helped earn him his 17th career Olympic medal. But it wasn’t enough to propel the U.S. 4×100-meter freestyle relay team to gold through two quirks of fate:

Ryan Lochte, who had won the 400-meter individual medley Saturday with a thrashing of fourth-place finisher Phelps, didn’t protect a .55 second lead he inherited into the anchor leg.

(PHOTO: Michael Phelps looks out over the pool as teammate Nathan Adrian congratulates Gold Medalists Team France after the men’s 4×100 Freestyle Relays during the Summer Olympic Games in London, England, Sunday, July 29, 2012.)

And Lochte was overtaken with a thrilling performance by Yannick Agnel of France, the very team that U.S. swimmer Jason Lezak had stunned with a remarkably similar last leg in Beijing to help boost Phelps to eight gold medals.

“It’s a form of revenge for four years ago,” said France’s Amaury Leveaux, who swam the first leg.

By night’s end, Phelps and Lochte seemed to have flipped their mind-sets from a night before, when Phelps was left chagrined and Lochte was emboldened by a thorough victory in a race that Phelps had won in the past two Olympics and in which he still holds the world record.

“I felt a lot better today than I did yesterday,” said Phelps, whose split in the race (47.15) was the fastest on the U.S. team and second overall to Agnel’s 46.74. “I was able to put yesterday behind me and kind of move on to today, and hopefully we can just move forward from here.”

Said relay mate Cullen Jones: “We all knew Michael was going to step up and do what he does best.”

Meanwhile, it was clear Lochte felt he had let down the team, which according to Jones was yelling “get to the wall, get to the wall” as Lochte didn’t fend off the charging Agnel and France won with a time of 3 minutes 9.93 seconds to beat the U.S. by .45 seconds.

Russia won the bronze in 3:11.41.

“I mean, the 100 free, I don’t really swim it, I haven’t swam it in a long time. So I think I was just really excited, and I think I over-swam the first 50, which kind of hurt me for the last 50,” said Lochte, who swam two preliminaries earlier Sunday. “You would think doing distance events, I wouldn’t get tired (in a 100), but sprinting takes a lot out of you.

“I made that mistake, but we were able to get a medal, so I guess that’s good.”

While Lochte called himself “kind of bummed,” he was said by teammates Jones and Nathan Adrian to need consoling.

“He’s the type of person who’s going to beat on himself until the next Olympics, so I already told him, ‘You’ve just got to get over that,’” said Jones, who swam the third leg in 47.60 and noted that Lochte swam a 47.74: “That’s an amazing race.”

Adrian set the tone by outdoing world champion James Magnussen of Australia (47.89 seconds to Magnussen’s 48.03) to hand the lead to Phelps, who increased the advantage to .76 seconds.

But Adrian, too, only had praise and encouragement for Lochte.

“He’s our teammate,” Adrian said. “There’s not a sense of anger. There’s a sense of, ‘Hey, you put yourself on the line for us.’ “

As for the final result, Adrian said: “We don’t go into any relay hoping for silver, hoping for bronze. … At the same time, we’ve got to take it for what it is and understand that we just won silver. So, it’s not that much of a disappointment.”

The ending was a remarkable inversion of Beijing, where Lezak was behind by roughly the same distance as Agnel was Sunday and swam a record 46.06 split in the final leg to give the U.S. a victory by .08 seconds in world-record time of 3:08.24.

“I still don’t know how some of the races ended up how they did,” Phelps said at the U.S. Olympic Media Summit in May, smiling. “But right place, right time.”

But not quite the entirely right place and time Sunday, at least for the U.S. team.

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