By: Iris Shen

Last week, during the swimming’s world championship in Budapest, Hungary, the 400-meter freestyle was held. But, the Olympic champion and the race’s new world-record holder is absent because she “didn’t feel like going.”

Born in a small city in Tasmania, an island south of mainland Australia, Ariarne Titmus was in the water from a very young age. The seven-year-old joined a local swim club and began to race. Her progress was as fast as her swimming. Titmus watched the Australian swimmers Stephanie Rice and Libby Trickett swim at the Beijing Olympics in 2008. “I was just glued to the TV,” she said in an interview with New York Times’s Kiera Pender.

Despite breaking the world record less than a month ago and the possibility of a showdown in Hungary with her biggest rival, Katie Ledecky, Titmus was absent from the most important international swim meet of the year. She has a simple reason: she decided she didn’t need to attend.

Confidence is not in short supply for Titmus. That’s why she was asleep in Australia when Ledecky was expected to re-take the 400 freestyle world title. “I’ll definitely be asleep,” Titmus said. “I’ll probably look up the results, look at the splits, but I really won’t pay too much attention to it.”

“When we first came together, Arnie was 38 seconds off Katie in the 800-meter freestyle, 16 seconds off Katie in the 400, and eight seconds off Katie in the 200,” said Dean Boxall, Titmus’s coach. “We never even thought about the Olympics. We were just getting on that journey and making sure she was getting better and better.”

Now, Titmus has beaten Ledecky in three of the past five individual finals they have raced in. In Australian swimming lore, their rivalry started at the last world championships, when 25-year-old Ledecky, after losing a race, was reported to have made an act of showing disdain to Titmus. Photographs from the meet painted a better picture, though, and Titmus said that she had nothing but respect for the swimming legend.

“Definitely when we’re in the pool racing, she’s my biggest rival,” Titmus said. “It doesn’t really matter who she is: I want to beat her … But then as a person, I seriously respect her. I know what it’s taken to get to this level, and she’s been at this level since I was 12 years old. I respect the work that she’s put into swimming. She’s changed female swimming.”

Source article: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/17/sports/olympics/ariarne-titmus-katie-ledecky-swimming-worlds.html