Olympian Richards replays moment he missed gold

Matt Richards missed out on Olympic gold by 0.02 seconds

Team GB swimmer Matt Richards has admitted he replays the 200m freestyle final at the Paris Olympics in his head after missing out on a gold medal by a fraction of a second.

The 22-year-old, who is from Droitwich, won silver after finishing 0.02 seconds behind Romanian teenager David Popovici.

Asked how often he had gone over the race in his mind, Richards said: "Many, many, many times, probably more times than I could count.

"It's one of those things where there's good parts and bad parts. One one hand, you've won an Olympic silver individually. On the other hand, you've missed out on gold by two hundredths of a second."

He added: "At the end of the day, that's sport and I think there's lessons to be learned on both sides of that coin, and parts of that I'll try to take forward with me again into this summer and beyond."

Richards will get another chance to race on the big stage at the World Aquatics Championships in Singapore next week.

'A lot of potential'

His appetite to win will be fuelled by his near miss last summer.

He said: "I'm always going to go into races with the goal and, I suppose, the expected outcome of trying to win the race regardless of what's happened in the previous race or somebody else's previous race or what's expected on paper.

"That's always going to be my goal.

"A race like that, it's always going to be one that sticks with you for good and bad reasons, but longer term, trying to put that right over the next few years and trying to turn that silver into gold is going to be the target."

Richards will swim the 100m freestyle as well as the 200m in Singapore.

He said: "I do think that the 100m, there's a lot of potential there for me.

"I've got a lot of speed, I'm a 21 second swimmer on the 50m but I've also got a real good engine on that 200m and I think, at some point, those two will come together really well and form a really strong 100m freestyle.