With all eight swimmers in the men's 200-meter breaststroke within 1.20 seconds of the world record set in 2012, Wednesday's Olympic final in Rio was anyone's race, including the man in the Lane 8.
Dmitriy Balandin of Kazakhstan, swimming with the slowest seed time, pulled a gigantic upset over the favored Americans and Japanese to give his country its first-ever swimming medal.
Yasuhiro Koseki raced out to an early lead, going under world-record pace through the halfway mark, but Balandin was hot on his tail, chasing down the swimmer from Japan at the wall and touching first at 2 minutes, 7.