After Games heartbreak, Liew turns pain into inspiration

If you want a tale of heartbreak, don't go fumbling in the romance section of a bookshop. Just ask any athlete and they'll tell you.

- Rohit Brijnath

About chances missed, bad breaks, last-minute goals. About emptiness, tears, splintered dreams. About a pain which they can precisely measure for you.

In open water swimmer Chantal Liew's case, it's 1.7 seconds.

Ask and she'll autopsy her heartbreak for you, just take you back to late 2023 when her form was strong and then sickness hit in Portugal.

"Insane gastro" followed, nausea, inability to eat, waking up weeks later in 2024 for the Olympic qualifier in Doha with a sore throat, mentally accepting her Games dream was done.

Then the race began and it "was the best I've ever swum internationally at the start of the race". Miracle? Nope. The past, all the diarrhoea she'd had, how sick she'd been, returned to ruin her present. Her strength faded, her charge wilted. She and the Chinese swimmer Xin Xin were fighting for an Olympic place and as the finish line beckoned they both sprinted and after 10km and over two hours the clock told her this story.

Xin 2hr 4min 21.10sec.

Liew 2:04:22.80.

Just half a stroke short of Paris 2024.

Maybe defeat by 15 seconds would have been better because 1.7 seconds was so achingly close.

Months later when the opening ceremony started in Paris, and she was watching with friends in Australia, she had to leave the room. Weeping, you understand.