“In the eyes of myself and my team around me, we can all admit it was a ‘failure’,” Short wrote to his 12,000 followers. As Ariarne Titmus, Kaylee McKeown and Mollie O’Callaghan celebrated gold medals, Short cut a dejected figure. It was even tougher to take given he’d made the bold call a few months earlier that he thought he could break the 400m and 1500m freestyle world records. “I just wanted to clear the air. It was kind of getting rid of a burden,” Short said of his Instagram post.