US men set world record in 4x100 medley relay as Caeleb Dressel wins fifth gold of Tokyo Olympics
TOKYO — Coaches for the U.S. men's team looked at the times of their swimmers before Sunday and knew a world record in the 4x100 men's medley relay was within reach.
And then Ryan Murphy, Michael Andrew, Caeleb Dressel and Zach Apple delivered, swimming in 3:26.78 at the Tokyo Olympics to break the 12-year-old record by .50 of a second.
The victory continued the Americans' dominance in the event, having never lost the men's medley relay at the Olympics. The only time they have not won gold was in 1980 when the entire team boycotted the Moscow Games.
And it also capped a remarkable Games for Dressel who won his fifth gold medal. He won gold in the 50-meter freestyle earlier in the day.
"I'm proud of myself," Dressel said. "I feel like I reached what my potential was here at these Games."
The relay team nearly didn't even make it to Sunday's race. A group of four other swimmers narrowly escaped the preliminaries, finishing in seventh place, .33 seconds ahead of the ninth-place team that did not qualify for the finals.
It prompted coaches to think and rethink what was the right lineup for Sunday.
"We had a good spirited discussion amongst the men’s coaching staff yesterday to make sure we were putting the right four out there," head coach Dave Durden said. "We looked at the splits of the world record and as we stopped for a second and thought about our guys on that relay, we kind of looked at each other said … we can do this."
The relay opened with Murphy taking the lead on backstroke, however, the Americans fell to third after Andrew's breaststroke. Dressel then regained the lead, outpacing James Guy of Great Britain by 1.24 seconds. Apple closed it out, swimming the fastest freestyle leg of the field at 46.95 seconds.
"I had confidence in Caeleb that he was going to give me a lead," Apple said. "I didn't know how fast he was going, but I knew he was giving his best effort and that's what I was going do as well. And it worked out."
Great Britain took the silver, finishing .73 behind the Americans. Italy took bronze.
"We sat down with our four guys and all we wanted them to do was swim at their level, and we knew that would produce a performance that would have a very good potential of breaking the world record," Durden said. "And if we went faster than anyone else has ever gone, we were going to feel good about that.”
The U.S. finishes the swimming program with more medals than any other country, including 30 overall and 11 golds. Australia won 20 overall and nine golds. Five years ago, at the Rio Games, the U.S. went home with 33 medals overall, including 16 golds.
The pressure was on the entire U.S. swim team to live up to the success of past teams, but the men's medley group perhaps felt an even greater sense of urgency given the decades of dominance in this event. In fact, some of the swimmers hadn't even left the pool after Saturday's mixed medley race, and they were already talking about Sunday.
"Right after the mixed medley it's like, 'OK, that is, that is done and over with, we've got a stacked men's medley coming up and we've got to go, get ready for that," Murphy said before he was interrupted by Dressel.
"That's the first thing (Murphy) said to me after the race: 'We've got business to take care of.' I was still in the water, I had not even gotten out of the water and he's already talking about the medley, that's how we work here and we knew we had a shot at doing something special."
Contributing: Alex Ptachick
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Olympics 2021: US sets world record 4x100 medley, Dressel's 5th gold
