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Shane Gould's loss in the 100-meter freestyle, supposedly one of her best events, was indeed a surprise—even though many of the American girl swimmers were less convinced of her invincibility than were the experts. (Round their Olympic Village dorm, the U.S. girls wore T shirts bearing the legend "All that glitters is not Gould.") Nonetheless, the tawny, long-legged Sydney schoolgirl began in high fashion, picking up a gold medal and a world record in the difficult 400-meter medley (four different strokes). But Shane, though she had nothing like a Mexico City memory to haunt her, was in many ways under more immediate pressure than Spitz, with whom she had shared the pre-Olympic spotlight. She had to train for a wider variety of events (medley to dashes to 800-meter) and did not have for support the sort of formidable team the Aussies have fielded in the past. The effects of the burden surfaced in the 100-meter freestyle. After the event, Shane ruefully conceded, "I just didn't have that edge" to catch the flying Americans. Soon, though, she was as good as Gould again. Shane splashed out to such a commanding lead in the 400-meter freestyle that ABC-TV commentators Keith Jackson and Donna de Varona ignored her and concentrated on the race for runner-up. She later notched another medal and world record in the 200-meter freestyle. By week's end Shane, Roommate Beverly Whitfield, 18, a clerk with the Off-Track Betting Agency in New South Wales who defeated the favored Russian Galina Stepanova in the 200-meter breaststroke, and young Gail Neall, the winner of the 400-meter medley, had picked up five gold medals for Australia.
Other nations began to show some early gill. In what was probably the closest race in Olympic history, Sweden's Gunnar Larsson hit his electronic touch plate at the end of the 400-meter individual medley just 2/1,000 of a second before American Tim McK.ee touched his. The finish was so microscopically close that the two swimmers had to dawdle anxiously in the water for several minutes before the computers could determine the winner. Micki King, 28, an Air Force captain who foundered in Mexico City when she hit the board during her penultimate dive and broke her arm, recouped in Munich with a come-from-behind victory in the 3-meter springboard competition over Sweden's favored Ulrika Knape. But when Vladimir Vasin took a gold medal in the men's 3-meter springboard, well ahead of Craig Lincoln of Hopkins, Minn., who salvaged a bronze, the Russians captured an event the U.S. had dominated since 1912. Two Americans also lost out in the 100-meter breaststroke to a grinning college student named Nobutaka Taguchi, who brought Japan its first aquatic gold medal since 1956.