Olympics
Grant Shimmin SWIMMING
There’s something about an Olympic year that just seems to bring new swimming stars crawling out of the woodwork. I mean, prior to last weekend, who’d ever heard of Ed Moses in this country?
No, I haven’t got my sports confused. I’m not talking about Llewellyn Herbert’s hero, the greatest 400m hurdler of all time. I’m referring to the American university student who set new short-course world records for the 100m and 200m breaststroke at last weekend’s American college championships in Minneapolis.
The thing about those new world marks is that they bettered records which had been set only a week earlier by Russian Roman Sloudnov at the world short-course championships in Athens. And Sloudnov, in the 200m event, had held off the challenge of South African Terence Parkin, a man widely expected to break the world mark himself after coming close to Andrei Korneev’s standard at a World Cup meet in Berlin in February.
Also in Minneapolis, South African Roland Schoeman, who had been widely tipped to break Briton Mark Foster’s record of 21,31 seconds in the 50m freestyle, succeeded, but he had a little-known American, Anthony Ervin, pipping him by a 100th of a second to claim the new mark of 21,21. In the heats, Schoeman had equalled Foster’s mark, with little hint of the challenge Ervin would mount when it really counted.
The point is that it’s pretty dangerous to get too carried away with predicting sweeping success for South Africa’s swimmers at the Sydney Olympics in September. All over the place, rising stars are setting out their stalls ahead of the greatest show on Earth and, despite what our team may have achieved recently, particularly at last year’s Pan Pacific championships in that same Olympic pool, when it comes to the Olympics, there are no guarantees.
Provided the country’s top swimmers realise that, though, one thing that should be guaranteed is a string of high-class performances when the swimming component of the national aquatic championships, which double as the Olympic trials, gets under way at Durban’s King’s Park pool on Sunday.
In 1996, the indoor venue famously witnessed the first of Penny Heyns’s multitude of breaststroke world records, a prelude to her double gold performance in Atlanta. That was at a time when South African swimming had Heyns and a couple of others clinging to her coat-tails as she soared into the stratosphere. This year, it’s a different story, although the holder of five short- and long-course world records again seems our best hope for swimming glory.
For one thing, she’ll have serious competition in the form of 17-year-old Sarah Poewe, winner of short-course world titles in the 50m and 100m, which means their clash in Durban over 100m has all the makings of a classic, and it would be a little surprising not to see a world mark.
Another such crunch encounter looms in the men’s 50m freestyle. Schoeman’s 22,04 last year was the fastest in the world for seven years but, not having got home for the nationals, the man from the University of Arizona wasn’t considered for the Pan Pacifics. That was where Brendon Dedekind announced his Olympic challenge, winning gold in 22,06 to be in a group ranked just behind Schoeman at the end of the year.
Throw in the challenge of Nick Folker, who would walk into the Olympic teams of many countries, and you are talking about 22 seconds of blurring power and speed which could have a significant impact on the same event in Sydney.
Along with other star names like Ryk Neethling – surprisingly beaten into third in the American college championships 1500m, after taking his tally of career titles there to nine, with victories in the 200m and 400m – Parkin, breaststroker Brett Peterson and the versatile Mandy Loots, you have the recipe for a compelling championship. With events up to 200m including semi-finals – B finals have been scrapped – at this year’s Games, the championship format will mirror that, which means an extra helping of excellence for the dedicated swimming supporter.