Rio Olympics 2016: James Guy should have two medals but he came into Games under-rested

Dejected: James Guy misses out on a medal again after finishing fourth in the 200m freestyle final
(Julian Finney/Getty Images)
Mark Foster9 August 2016

It was another hard night for James Guy and I know he’ll come away quite gutted as a result.

From the quarter-finals, both the gold and silver in the 400metre freestyle were gone for him while in last night’s race over 200m after the semi-finals he had a great chance to win silver.

Gold was probably never realistic, Sun Yang was just that much clear of everyone else.

If you were to look back and assess James’s two finals, in retrospect he wouldn’t have won either but he should have won a medal in both, and to have come away with two Olympic medals would have been great.

Things haven’t suddenly gone horribly wrong for him but he’s not quite where we’ve seen him in the past. Coming into these Games, he went to altitude four or five weeks ago and either he worked too hard or he didn’t quite get enough rest. Unless you do something like that a lot, it’s hard to gauge it and you have to remember he’s still just 20.

As a swimmer, you’d always rather come into a meet over rather than under-rested and, for me, he was the latter. He looked tired in the water but he also looked tired in his face from the moment of that first press conference at the start of the week.

Right now, he doesn’t look like the James Guy that I know.

But it’s important to say that this isn’t the end of James Guy, far from it in fact. He’s still at the beginning of his career and he’ll certainly learn from this. He’s definitely here for another Olympic Games, probably even two, and he knows he’s good enough to beat these guys because he’s done it before.

There was never a point going into Rio where I thought he’d wipe everyone away as world champion because he’s not that good, well, not just yet anyway.

I’ve really enjoyed watching him swim as the last two years have seemingly been effortless for him and we all know what he can do, it’s just things weren’t quite right for him here and he knows that. Whether that’s the rest period or the effect of altitude, I just don’t know.

But with more still to come from him, it’s an exciting time for British swimming.

There will be more medals for us this week. I’m excited to see Siobhan-Marie O’Connor in the 200m individual medley. She could win that but I don’t think she will, not with the roll Katinka Hosszu is currently on.

Rio 2016 Olympic Games Moments - In pictures

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But with her, James at his best, Adam Peaty and Jazz Carlin, who swum a magnificent race the previous night, we have four of the best swimmers in the world in their events.

For me, Siobhan will get the silver medal, likewise Jazz again in the 800m freestyle. For both of them, the gold has gone. It’s a bit like when Roger Black was racing against Michael Johnson in his pomp, the silver in a sense was Black’s gold. With Jazz up against Katie Ledecky and Siobhan facing Hosszu, that’s also the case.

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