If it was day 12, it had to be the women's open-water swimming. What an event - new to the Olympics in 2008 and, in this column's opinion, straight in at No1 with a bullet. “It's a real marathon for a woman,” Hazel Irvine reckoned, and one could see what she was getting at, although, technically, in the context of an Olympic meeting, the “real marathon for a woman” is normally the women's marathon. I don't think there can be any argument about that. The open-water swimming, on the other hand - ten kilometres of largely unregulated, lane-free argy-bargy in rubber suits - is ... well, it's something else altogether.

Adequate metaphors are bound to escape one. Let's just say that this convention-defying discipline narrows to an unprecedented degree the gap between swimming and a fight in a wet car park. We hadn't realised, until Stuart Storey explained it to us, that the reason the triathletes wear identical swimming hats for the water-bound stage of their journey is not just to make life miserable - indeed, impossible - for commentators such as Storey, but to guarantee anonymity and discourage people from taking out their rivals by sinking them in the early stages.

Open-water swimming, however, knows no such niceties. You wear the hat of your nation, so if anyone wants to sit on the Russian world champion during the opening exchanges, they get a handy latex sighter and can feel free. And it's a shame that no one did yesterday, because the Russian narrowly blitzed our brave British pair in the final metres, nudging them back into silver and bronze positions - which is hugely creditable, of course, except that in this, the age of the British “gold rush”, our expectations now point at the ceiling and we mutter rather haughtily about “mere” bronzes, in the way Australians used to.

Barging aside, or even swimming right over, the swimmer ahead of you is entirely within your job description as an open-water swimmer. There are no signs up prohibiting diving, running or bombing, either. Petting is probably OK, as well, but it won't get you up with the leaders. Steve Parry, in the commentary box, watched the liquid scrap developing in front of him and declared, “As a pure-water swimmer, I would hate that.” As someone who lost focus after Prelim 1, I would hate that, too.

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It's great to stare at, though. Yesterday we looked on, aghast, as Cassie Patten swum unwittingly into a thumping great yellow buoy and nearly tangled herself in its trailing rope. It was like something out of Tarka the Otter, with the difference being that this time one cared about what happened at the end. And with the other difference being that there was nothing hinging on the fate of Tarka in terms of lottery funding for 2012.

While we're on the subject of tear-jerking animal sagas, BBC news was heavily rotating a breaking story from Sea World in Orlando, Florida, where Shamu the killer whale has apparently been watching Michael Phelps on the big screen and imitating him in the water. But let's be serious. The killer whale didn't get the idea off Phelps. Phelps got the idea off the killer whale. Anyway, does Shamu really watch telly? Let's hope he didn't tune in for the open-water swimming. If he starts getting ideas from that, in the pool he calls home, lives could be in danger.

In other news, Michael Johnson managed to smile even after Usain Bolt tore up his prediction and stormed off with his world record. Dame Kelly Holmes has produced the best statement yet on the mysteries of athletic excellence: “It's such a fine line between being brilliant and injured.” And at the synchronised swimming (disappointingly not an open-water event), China are fielding Jiang Tingting and Jiang Wenwen and the BBC is using American commentators called Karen and Karin. Is this a wind-up? Anyway, as Karen (or possibly Karin) said about Jiang and Jiang, “They've got gorgeous legs and they do really neat moves together.” There's not a lot you can add to that, really.