{"id":401871,"date":"2024-06-11T00:45:17","date_gmt":"2024-06-11T00:45:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/?p=401871"},"modified":"2024-06-11T05:08:40","modified_gmt":"2024-06-11T05:08:40","slug":"aussies-unfathomable-gold-that-shocked-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/?p=401871","title":{"rendered":"Aussie's unfathomable gold that shocked the world"},"content":{"rendered":"

To mark 100 days from the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, Nine.com.au asked you what your favourite Olympic memories were in a survey. The response was overwhelming! We chose 50 of them to re-live, one a day, before new memories are made in Paris. Scroll on for today's memory.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The magnitude of Jon Sieben's shock gold medal swim at the 1984 Olympics<\/a> spilled over in a glorious celebration.<\/p>\n

Shrieking with elation, the Australian flopped his exhausted body on a lane rope, struggling to fathom what he had achieved in a tick under two minutes in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

The 17-year-old, nicknamed "Shrimp" because he stood at just 173cm, took to the 200m butterfly final as a rank outsider, so much so that he had swum two seconds faster than his previous personal best just to qualify.<\/p>\n

He was also taking on the 200m butterfly world record holder, West Germany's Michael Gross, known as "Albatross" because of his 200cm height and 225cm wingspan, as well as the 100m butterfly world record holder, the United States' Pablo Morales.<\/p>\n

Gross had already won two gold medals at the Los Angeles Games and was the red-hot favourite\ufeff to bag a third.<\/p>\n

Watch the video at the top of the page to see Jon Sieben's astonishing win at the Los Angeles 1984 Olympics!<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

When Sieben turned at the 150m mark he was placed fourth, behind Gross, Morales and Venezuela's Rafael Castro.<\/p>\n

Then he exploded.<\/p>\n

\"Jon<\/p>\n

The Brisbane teenager, swimming in lane six, tore past the three men ahead of him and touched the wall in world record time, clocking 1:57.04.<\/p>\n

He swam a time four seconds faster than he had ever swum before.<\/p>\n

"I just had a feeling. I was swimming really fast at the end," Sieben said on SEN radio this year, almost 40 years after his gold medal swim.<\/p>\n

"I touched the wall and then by the time I looked up I could see Gross. I didn't get clear vision, I wasn't quite sure and I had to turn around, and the scoreboard was at the far end of the pool and I just saw this '1' flashing \ufeffbeside my name, which meant I'd won, so that was pretty cool."<\/p>\n

Sieben hauled in Australia's only swimming gold medal of the 1984 Olympics.\ufeff<\/p>\n

"The time I didn't even register," he said.<\/p>\n

"I didn't even know what time I'd swum, I didn't even realise I'd broken the world record until about an hour after the event. I even went to the medal ceremony\ufeff and they said it was a world record.<\/p>\n

"I was in la-la land. I was like, 'I won, I won, I won'."<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To mark 100 days from the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, Nine.com.au asked you what your favourite Olympic memories were in a […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":400326,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401871"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=401871"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401871\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":401878,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401871\/revisions\/401878"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/400326"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=401871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=401871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=401871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}