He failed to reach the top 16 final in two out of his three attempts, finishing twenty-first in the 200 m individual medley (2:06.16), and eighteenth in the 400 m individual medley (4:28.04). In his third attempt, 200 m breaststroke, Kalmikovs powered home with a thirteenth-place effort in the B-Final at 2:16.23. At the 1998 FINA World Championships in Perth, Australia, Kalmikovs placed twenty-second in the 200 m breaststroke (2:21.22), and thirty-eighth in the 200 m individual medley (2:10.28), all from the prelims. At the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Kalmikovs decided to drop half of his medley double, and experiment instead with 100 m breaststroke. He achieved FINA B-standards of 1:04.89 (100 m breaststroke), 2:16.30 (200 m breaststroke), and 2:04.83 (200 m individual medley) from the European Championships in Helsinki. On the first day of the Games, Kalmikovs placed thirty-fourth in the 100 m breaststroke. Swimming in heat four, he enjoyed a sprint finish with Puerto Rico's Arsenio López, as they both hit the wall first in a matching time of 1:04.02. Three days later, in the 200 m breaststroke, Kalmikovs established a new Latvian record of 2:16.21 to pull off a nineteenth-place effort from the heats, but missed the semifinal cut by more than half a second (0.50). In his final event, 200 m individual medley, Kalmikovs placed twenty-fourth on the morning prelims. Swimming again in heat four, he came up short in second place by 0.11 of a second behind New Zealand's Dean Kent in a lifetime best of 2:04.18. At the 2001 FINA World Championships in Fukuoka, Japan, Kalmikovs competed only in a breaststroke double. He failed to produce best results for the semifinals in any of his individual events, finishing thirty-fifth in the 100 m breaststroke (1:05.36), and twenty-first in the 200 m breaststroke (2:19.23). Kalmikovs also sought his bid for his third Olympics in Athens, but forced to drop out from the Games, because of a wrist injury.