MELBOURNE, Australia — When the women’s 400-meter freestyle final is swum and won on Saturday at swimming’s world championships in Budapest, the reigning world and Olympic champion in the event, the race’s new world record-holder, will be halfway around the world — and fast asleep.
“I’ll definitely be asleep,” Ariarne Titmus, 21, said in an interview earlier this month. (The race will start at 1:30 a.m. in Australia). “I’ll probably look up the results, look at the splits, but I really won’t pay too much attention to it.”
Despite breaking the world record less than a month ago, despite being in some of the best form of her young career, and despite the prospect of a showdown in Hungary with her biggest rival, Katie Ledecky of the United States, the 21-year-old Titmus will be absent from the most significant international swim meet of the year.