Updated on
Summary Nicola Spirig of Switzerland woth the women's triathlon gold at London Olympics.
It was the type of side-by-side finish more often associated with a 100-metre sprint.This time, it came after a grueling two-hour endurance test of swimming, cycling and running but showed once again how any Olympic gold medal can be decided by the thinnest of margins.Not even the clock could tell Nicola Spirig and Lisa Norden apart in the womens triathlon as they lunged forward to break the tape held up over the finish line for almost simultaneously.In the end, Spirig of Switzerland won the Olympic title in a photo finish after her Swedish rivals desperate late sprint following a lung-bursting, long-distance effort came up millimetres short.For Norden, it was agonizingly close.Im always a little bit too late, hey? Norden joked after arriving at the press conference a few minutes after the other two medalists.In one of the closest triathlon finishes ever, she probably would have won had the finish line just been one metre further away.At least I can say I pushed it all the way to the finish line and Im pretty happy with that, she said, pointing out she wasnt normally very good in sprint finishes. I hope I made my coach proud today.Track runners and swimmers are used to missing out by hundredths of a second sometimes ask Michael Phelps after he was beaten by Chad le Clos by .05 seconds in the 200-metre butterfly.But that race lasted less than two minutes.At Hyde Park, the Spirig and Norden were clocked with the same time at the end of a 1,500-metre swim, a 43-kilometre (26.7-mile) bike ride and a 10-kilometre run that went for nearly 120 minutes.After all that, the two athletes burst through the tape together in 1 hour, 59 minutes, 48 seconds. They then both fell to the ground, exhausted, alongside bronze medalist Erin Densham who was only two seconds back.Both athletes celebrated, but only after theyd recovered. Who won? Nobody knew at first.In the end, the photo showed a desperate Spirig had held off the late charge by a surging Norden. The Swiss thrust out her hips and upper body to win, denying her challenger a come-from-behind victory at the very end.
