THE women's 100-metre butterfly final may have looked a thriller, as a resurgent Libby Trickett and her close friend and Australian team-mate Jessicah Schipper raced home to win gold and bronze, respectively. But the real drama happened before the start, in the swimmers' marshalling area.
With only seconds to go, Trickett was choking back a vomiting attack. Worse, Schipper was panicking and in tears, as she struggled out of her futuristic, fastskin swimsuit - which had suffered what was later described as a "zipper malfunction" - and climb into a replacement.
"For a while in there it was just total chaos," a team official admitted later.
Pre-race nerves are nothing new for Trickett, 23, who had a similar costume malfunction the previous day. "Nerves are part of the way my body gets me ready to race. This time, though, I was nervous to the point where I was almost vomiting."
However, she quickly talked herself out of the crisis. "Just before I walked out, I thought, 'You're here, you've done the work, you have the confidence to do a good job.' " At that point, she explained with a smile and a sigh of relief, a "nice feeling of calm came over me".
Schipper, 21, who has been in the wake of Australia's latest "Madame Butterfly" for several years, was not so fortunate.
She seemed reluctant to go into detail, saying only: "I was getting into my suit as we were going into marshalling and it wouldn't zip up. I had to do a quick change into another suit.
I got it on in the end, but I was probably a little bit stressed out."
It was later revealed that Trickett, swim-team officials and representatives of Speedo, makers of the LZR Racer, all helped a tearful Schipper strip and climb into a replacement. The team spokesman, Ian Hanson, confirmed that the suits are so tight that putting them on can take several minutes.
"After all the drama, that was an extraordinary swim by Jessicah," Hanson said. Inevitably, it was a subdued Schipper who faced the cameras afterwards, though she thanked Trickett for helping her settle down and insisted she was "happy with the way things had turned out".
Trickett, by contrast, was still shaking with emotion, with joy, with relief, more than an hour after the event. She had been disappointed with her gold, bronze and 9th place (semi-final) finish in Athens four years ago,
and felt that here she had realised her true potential.
"I'm in my career-best form," said Trickett, who won a bronze with the relay team on Sunday. "To come here and swim a personal best time in an Olympic final is more than I could have hoped for. And to walk away with a gold medal … well, it's blown me away. Anything I do from here is like a bonus."
She said the Water Cube aquatic centre was like a home from home, a home from Homebush Bay.
"It's a very fast course … for an Australian it feels a lot like Olympic Park in Sydney. I just love racing there," she said.
Trickett displayed a tattoo on her wrist that reads "Light of my life". It reminds her of the important things in her life, such as her husband and team-mate Luke, who was there to cheer her home.
Elsewhere on golden pond, Australia's boosted its medal tally after two days to five, when the men's 4x100m relay team won bronze behind the breast-beating, alpha-male Americans and the disappointed French.
It was an encouraging start for the team which had to wait until the last event to win a medal at the Melbourne Commonwealth Games two years ago.
Yesterday's medal was hard-won. Eamon Sullivan set an individual world record of 47.24 seconds in his lead-off leg. Team-mate Ashley Callus collapsed with exhaustion and spent about 10 minutes poolside before recovering.
There are, of course, other nations, other sports, other winners at these Games.
The American swimmer Michael Phelps kept his dream of a record eight medals at one Olympics alive by powering the relay team home, but struggled to qualify for the 200m freestyle final.
Two little-known British swimmers, Rebecca Adlington and Joanne Jackson, finished first and third in the women's 400m freestyle.
And at the shooting range, India's Abhinav Bindra won gold in the men's 10m air rifle, beating off a challenge from the local hero and Athens gold medallist Zhu Qinan.
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