Amid Olympic Failure, Cesar Cielo Grows Sprint Legend With 52nd Sub-22

2016 MARIA LENK TROPHY OPEN CHAMPIONSHIPS

• Friday, April 15th – Wednesday, April 20th
• Olympic Aquatics Stadium, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• Prelims 9:30am local/8:30am EDT; Finals 5:30pm local/4:30pm EDT
• Brazilian Olympic Selection Criteria
• Maria Lenk Start List
• Meet Schedule
• Real-Time Results
• Qualifiers After Day 5

Failure is a funny word, especially for athletes. In sports, failure is inevitable. Nobody wins all of the time, and at some point the body refuses to perform the way that the mind wills it to.

Cesar Cielo knew little of failure at the peak of his career. He won gold in the 50 free at the 2008 Olympics and the 2009, 2011 and 2013 World Championships. He’s the fastest man to ever cross a 50 meter pool, and he’s the fastest man ever to cross it twice back-and-forth. Until recently, he was the fastest 50 yard freestyler as well.

But there will be a hole in Cielo’s resume. Just as he was fortuitous to have the prime of his career during a super-suit era where almost every record set anywhere was broken, time has now been his heel, as at 29 years old, lingering injuries and inconsistent training has left Cielo short of competing in front of a home crowd as an individual at the 2016 Olympics. This could have been a happy and fitting final story to a roller-coaster career, and instead is a story that ends in heartbreak for the Brazilian.

While a failed doping test, that earned him just a warning, in 2011, will taint that career in the minds of many, his explanation was as plausible as any – leaving the trust in his excuse a rather black-and-white matter of whether any excuse is acceptable for a failed test.

With that issue aside, in the pool, Cielo changed sprinting. When Cesar Cielo was born in 1987, the sport was still three years short of Tom Jager becoming the first swimmer to go faster than 22 seconds.

In his career, Cielo has now been under 22 seconds in the 50 free an astonishing 52 times – with numbers 51 (21.99) and 52 (21.91) on Wednesday at the Maria Lenk Trophy not being enough to get him a spot for the Olympic Games.

That’s more than any other swimmer in history – Frenchman Florent Manaudou, the 2012 Olympic Champion, has done so 40 times, and Nathan Adrian, the 2015 Worlds silver medalist, has done so 45 times.

It was Cielo who opened those floodgates. Before Cielo, going sub-22 was a rarity preserved for the biggest meets. Much like what has happened with 48 seconds in the 100 free, anything north of a 22 is now unremarkable for a senior-level swimmer at almost any meet.

Matt Biondi, the last man to win the Olympics with a 22-second 50 meter freestyle, could’ve suffered a similar fate. He took gold in 1988 and silver in 1992, but walked away without trying for the home Games in 1996

If this is the end for Cielo, it will be a hanging wire, a missing punctuation, a tragic conclusion to a great swim epic, in the right city and the right pool, but at the wrong meet.