From Simon Barnes in Sydney
At the very last it was England against Germany and, of course, it came down to penalties. So naturally, you already know who came second: Paul Ratcliffe, Britain’s Great Whitewater Hope, performed a wild high-risk skedaddle down the great sluicing hill of water, and had to settle for silver in the men’s kayak singles slalom.
He did so with more disappointment than delight. He knew that a gold was in his grasp. He knew that it was taken from him by the Great Olympic Twitch.
As well as picking up the penalties, he had a spectacular capsize at the end of his first run, and only just managed to rescue himself from disaster and disqualification. He righted himself just a half-second before crossing the line; had he failed to do so, he would have been disqualified. As it was, it was a time-consuming manoeuvre, since you can’t really paddle your fastest upside down, even in Australia.
"It’s never happened to me before," he said. The fact that it happened here was not a matter of chance - just a classic example of the Great Olympic Twitch. It is highly to his credit that he recovered from this blow to take the silver.
Ratcliffe reckons the capsize cost him a couple of seconds, and that, plus the two penalties, was the difference between silver and gold. "I’m not really happy," he said. "It was a bad day at the office for me - two touches and a capsize at the bottom. I’m a little subdued. My goal was gold."
They are big on penalties in this thrilling and turbulent sporting backwater: a fine of 2sec for touching a gate, and 50 for missing one. Lynn Simpson missed a gate by about a half-inch in Atlanta four years ago, a tiny error that saw her plummet from first to 27th.
Ratcliffe has sensational speed, and he took his second run like John Whitaker in a jump-off, shaving millimetres and microseconds with a mad adrenaline-charged greed. But he had a 2sec penalty on his first run, and picked up another on his second. That and the capsize allowed Germany's Thomas Schmidt to take the big medal.
It was a strange and stirring sight to see the succession of competitors do battle with these human-made rapids. They were carried through the downstream gates so swiftly it almost seemed against their will, but then they had to turn and battle against the weight of rushing water to pass through gates in the opposite direction.
Most of the passage from start to finish is a matter of co-operating with the water, going with the flow, but the process is punctuated by fierce and desperate arguments in which you seem to be getting absolutely nowhere. A bit like marriage, really.
It is the upstream gates that sort them out: the top paddler performs a sort of hand-brake turn to spin round, and the lesser man looks like a spider trying not to be flushed down the plug-hole. There is something of the traditional nightmare in this sport. When a competitor gets a gate badly wrong, it is reminiscent of the dreams you have where you try to run at top speed only to find yourself wading through treacle.
Ratcliffe’s first run was, if anything, a little over-committed. That is the thing about the Olympic Games: there is no way of preparing for being in medal contention in the Olympic Games other than being in medal contention in the Olympic Games. Ratcliffe has been World Cup champion for three successive years, but that don’t mean diddlysquat here.
For the heartland Olympic sports like this one, the Olympic medal means more than everything in the sport put together. And you don’t know how you’re going to react to that kind of situation: the Games, hour by hour, provides every competitor with the If test beyond all If tests. And many respond with the Great Olympic Twitch.
As world No 1, Ratcliffe came here as very much a live prospect for gold, but this is a notoriously unpredictable event. His first run had something a little demented about it - extraordinarily swift over the middle section despite picking up a penalty.
The final chunk of the course is all downstream: a wild schuss, a leap from one level to the next into a boiling cauldron, and a wild windmilling paddle to the finish. It was here on the first run that Ratcliffe, giving his all and a little bit more, rolled his canoe.
For half a second it looked as if he had completely Devon Loched himself, but he bobbed up again with the inevitability of a wobbly-man toy, dripping and angry. It came because of the extra risks he took after incurring the penalty. "I had to go for it and I ran out of juice in my arms at the end," he said. "I didn’t have the power to keep it upright. I was lucky to pull off the silver."
After the medal ceremony and the applause of visiting Brits, he was visibly cheered, as indeed he should be. He was justly pleased with his comeback from disaster. But that is the Olympics for you. It is the difference between walking along a kerbstone with a few inches drop, and one with the drop of a couple of miles. Small wonder you get the odd twitch.
