Swimming / European Swimming Championships: Hardcastle fails to stem tide of time: Comeback ends with disappointing last place in 400m freestyle final

THERE was a slight possibility yesterday that an answer would be uncovered to the perennial question as to the finest comeback in British sporting history. Sarah Hardcastle would have had a claim had she won gold here in the women's 400 metres freestyle at the European Swimming Championships here but she failed to do so. The query remains unresolved.

Hardcastle was Britain's perpetual 'youngest ever' in the early 1980s, assuming a role, albeit at a different stroke, as the most talented successor to Anita Lonsbrough. In 1984 she won an Olympic silver and two years later she was the Commonwealth Games champion but within months had given up the sport to assume a normal life.

Only last September, after an absence of six years, did the 24-year-old from Southend commit herself fully to returning to a life of dawn labour. She did so in an event where practice lengths act like fuel in the tank when it comes to finding something extra in major finals. It showed.

Hardcastle had given life to hope by recording the fourth-fastest time in Europe this year and had also said she expected to go faster in the evening after being the sixth-fastest qualifier in the morning heats. When it came to the race proper she never remotely looked like challenging the Olympic champion and and the eventual winner, Germany's Dagmar Hase.

Hardcastle's false start at the first time of asking did not augur well and the portents were confirmed when she was seventh after 100 metres. That was the high point: she slipped to last place by the half-way mark and remained there throughout.

By the finish she was exactly 10 seconds, and a generation of swimmers, behind Hase's time of 4min 17.47sec. Hardcastle, her feet resolutely on the ground, had insisted through the pre- championship conjecture that reaching the final would be an achievement given the fledgling nature of her preparation and so it would prove.

The proof was less clear in the women's 100m backstroke when the scoreboard lit up to announce that Krisztina Egerszegi had failed to win an event in which she is the world record holder. Unbelievable, was the consensus in the Ponds Forge pool, and it was. The touch-pad timer in the Hungarian's lane had failed to respond. After television evidence was examined, Egerszegi was announced the winner, collecting her second gold of the championships. Britain's Kathy Osher was sixth.

Even Egerszegi's haul has been surpassed by Franziska van Almsick, however, who won her fourth title here in the 4x100m freestyle relay. The 15-year-old led the German team off in an overt attempt on the world record held by the Americans but despite her blistering 54.62sec leg - faster than the US by 0.84sec - they finished two seconds adrift of the time set last year.

Britain were sixth in that event, one place better than Mike Fibbens, who trailed in more than a second behind the winner of the men's 100m freestyle, Alexander Popov. His chance of a medal will come in the 50m tomorrow.

----------------------------------------------------------------- EUROPEAN SWIMMING CHAMPIONSHIPS RESULTS ----------------------------------------------------------------- MEDALS TABLE G S B Germany 9 4 4 Russia 8 7 3 Hungary 4 0 0 Finland 1 1 0 Belgium 1 0 0 Poland 1 0 0 Sweden 0 4 2 France 0 3 2 Great Britain 0 2 5 Romania 0 1 0 Slovakia 0 1 0 Spain 0 1 0 Italy 0 0 2 Ukraine 0 0 2 Croatia 0 0 1 Cz Rep 0 0 1 Netherlands 0 0 1 Norway 0 0 1 -----------------------------------------------------------------

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