KEY POINTS:
The more we see of Moss Burmester the more reason to be proud of him. He's a superb athlete. Last night's fight for a medal, and at the World Championships, says that. In television interviews he comes across as an obliging and solid citizen.
He needs to be.
Swimming's training regime is famously brutal.
It drags people out of bed to shove themselves up and down a pool for appalling numbers of hours.
They are endlessly told to do it better. They make adjustments, ever working towards the one meeting that really matters, the Olympics.
Then, he gets to the end of the big race. He gives it all, breaks more New Zealand records than he knew existed, and looks up at the scoreboard.
Yep, Phelps won. But, Burmester was a fingertip off a bronze medal. If he'd been over on the other side of the pool, where the second and third placegetters dragged each other to glory he'd probably have got something.
But, he didn't.
That's a moment of exquisite pain. How can he not feel the years of work are gone, for not much?
Then someone from TVNZ rushes up, after losing his big moment in shuffle, shoves a microphone under his nose and asks him how it feels to have swum such a wonderful race, and lost.
There are athletes who would grab the microphone, with interviewer attached, drag them to the pool and hurl them in, then snatch the camera and beat it into a hundred pieces on the starting blocks.
It'd be great television. It'd only take microseconds for every network in the world to have it in living rooms and bars. The first postings would be on YouTube within the quarter hour.
The officials would stop it. Not so athletes. My money says any of them who has endured an excessively intrusive interview, which would be all of them, would be yelling, 'Go Moss baby, go!'
Even at my low level of sport, Auckland interclub tennis, to have given it all and then have someone ask how you feel is to produce a phrase ending in 'Off'
But, Moss didn't. He did what he does. Breathed in, did his best, gave what he could, and walked away with his dignity.
He might not have won his swimming race but he won that moment, and by a long, long way.
