- First defeat in eight years as Englishman finishes fourth
- Peaty: ‘I had nothing left in the tank with 25m to go’
For eight extraordinary years, Adam Peaty has been swimming’s Mr Invincible: unbeatable and impregnable, chasing records and leaving others gulping in his slipstream. Yet on a wild and discombobulating night in Birmingham he suffered surely the biggest shock in Commonwealth Games history as he finished fourth in the men’s 100m breaststroke final.
Fourth! This was swimming’s equivalent of Buster Douglas knocking out Mike Tyson. Of the US soccer team defeating England in the 1950 World Cup. A moment when everything we thought we knew about a sport was picked up and spun discordantly off its axis.
