China's swimmer Pan Zhanle: Team gold medal celebrates birthday

As the world continues to debate and question his astonishing 100m freestyle world record, China's Pan Zhanle has backed it up with another truly jaw-dropping swim, setting a new record for the quickest relay leg in history to help China to a strong result in the pool amid the doping controversy engulfing the nation.

Pan celebrated his 20th birthday on Sunday (Aug. 4, Paris time) with a storming final leg to hand China gold in the men's Olympic 4x100m medley relay.

The Chinese team of Xu Jiayu, Qin Haiyang, Sun Jiajun and Pan touched in 3min 27.46sec with the United States second in 3:28.01.

August 4 was Pan's birthday. After the competition, Pan wrote: ''For my 20th birthday gift, I honoured my promise made a year ago. I celebrated my birthday with the team gold medal."

Nine days of high-intensity Olympic journey, finally finished, 2 gold and 1 silver results list, quite satisfied, he said.

He added, "A new journey has begun, and the goal has been set up, I hope I can make more contributions to the team, and the China swimming team is always the best!"

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