Beaten over her specialist 800m distance at London 2012 by 15-year-old American starlet Katie Ledecky, our girl with the golden gongs admitted last night she felt more like the grand old dame of doggy-paddle.
If you're struggling to picture what I mean, imagine someone climbing an imaginary ladder, or a small child doing the doggy-paddle in a non-existent swimming pool.
Best stroke of the lot, though, has to be doggy-paddle. I warmed down with a few widths of doggy after my butterfly session and managed to win back the affections of the pool regulars.
Without recourse to the breast- stroke or the doggy-paddle, your average parrot-fish glides effortlessly through the water, wiggling his tail-fin provocatively at the trailing females.
He strides in a businesslike manner to the slope leading to the water and plunges in, setting off happily at a purposeful doggy-paddle up the pool, head up, teeth bared.
MICHELLE Stannard King sent in this picture of daughter Georgia Kountis, seven, doing the doggy-paddle alongside her pet dog Troy in their garden in Sandringham Road, Tuebrook
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