Simon Barnes's Olympic blog

By rights, any heartland Olympic sport should have about it some element of madness. It should provoke the thought that you're mad even to take part. That's true of the marathon, whitewater canoeing, rowing (look at the faces at the finish), eventing, synchronised swimming, handball. You feel that the world needs this kind of madness, though perhaps not all the time.

It was a thought that took me to the first open-water swim at the Olympic Games since 1896, to the women's ten-kilometre marathon. Now that's what I call a sport: 25 majestic female athletes, ten kilometres of water and no cissy stuff like lanes. And there's no wall to kick off, no blue line to follow, no warm water, no tumble turns, no fancy strokes like butterfly and breaststroke, just the elemental simplicity of an extremely large amount of water and an awful lot of women fighting in it.

Larisa Ilchenko got a yellow card, but she was so busy fighting with the Brazilians that she never even noticed. “They were very aggressive,” she said. After the finish, Cassie Patten, of Great Britain, turned furiously on Angela Maurer, the Germany swimmer, a fearsome sight. Maurer, she explained later, had grabbed hold of her leg and pulled her back at the finish. Not far enough, as it happened, Patten still finished ahead. And I doubt if Maurer will do it again. Not to Patten, anyway.

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It was a great, glorious splashing battle from beginning to end. It took place at the rowing lake - they took care to stop the rowing, I wouldn't fancy the oarsmen's chances against this lot - and involved four circuits around the marker buoys, and make sure you don't get slammed into one on the turn. It's all feet in the face and clashing arms and hands accidentally-on-purpose whacking adjacent heads. Not precisely no holds barred, but it's hard to get too fussy with so many arms, so many legs and so much churning, foaming water. And such a long way to travel: two hours of it.

The British women, Patten and Keri-Anne Payne - Kez and Caz - are best mates and training partners, and they made an impromptu decision to swim together and run their race like Kenyans, team-handed. They took the front, safe from all those arms and legs, and swam stroke for stroke for just about all the race, a ten-kilometre synchronised swim.

They enjoyed working together, carved the pace up as they wished, knew that they wouldn't cuff each other about the face and neck. The problem was to stop other people going past them, and this they did with remarkable effectiveness. But here's a fact of physics: a swimmer can ride in the slipstream just as a cyclist can.

Up front you can steer clear of the bumps and the bangs, but you have to break the water for yourself. If you tuck in behind, you can ride in water that's already moving. It's that little bit less tiring, and little bits add up over two hours of swimming. What's more, if you have a pair of feet to follow, you don't have to look up so often to find your way. That, too, saves energy; energy you can use at the finish.

And there, tucked in just behind Patten's feet, was the soon-to-be-yellow-carded Russian, Ilchenko. She followed these feet for about nine kilometres, never wavering. Ilchenko has won eight World Championships in open-water swimming by adopting this tactic. She does it every time. Is that quite fair? “It doesn't bother me in the least. It's a competition. Should I let another girl take my medal?”

And so, with terrible inevitability, Ilchenko escaped from the Brazilians and made her big move. The two Britons formed a moving barrier, crossed to block her at the side, came together to stop her going between them - and for a long minute, it looked as if it might actually work. But Ilchenko has a devastatingly fast last 400, and through she came, leaving Payne with the silver and Patten with the bronze. But as Patten said of her spat with the German, caressing her medal with a certain measure of awe: “I've got one of these and she hasn't.” It's hard, and a distinctly mad area of sport. And to think: in four years' time they'll be doing it in the Serpentine.