Poland has named a 32-swimmer team that will attend training camps to prepare for the 2018 European Junior Swimming Championships, which will take place from June 28th-July 2nd in Helsinki, Finland. The meet is for female swimmers aged 15 to 16 years old and male swimmers aged 17 to 18 years old, based on their age at December 31st of this year.
Poland returns 1 individual medalist and a handful of relay swimmers from a team that finished 7th in the medals table last year with 2 golds, 1 silver and 6 bronze. Their 9 total medals ranked only behind Russia, Hungary, and Italy in terms of unweighted hardware counts, though 6 bronze slid them down the official ranking.
The returning individual medalist is Jakub Kraska, who was a bronze medalist in the 100 free last year behind Hungary’s Nandor Nemeth and Moldova’s Alexei Sancov, both of whom have aged out of the meet. Kraska also anchored Poland’s gold-medal-winning 500 free relay in 48.88, and swam the fly leg on their bronze-medal-winning 400 medley relay in 53.09. He further split 48.67 on another bronze medal winning relay in the mixed 400 free event.
Of Poland’s 9 medals, 7 were won by its men’s team, 1 was won by its women’s team, and the last was from a mixed relay. That competitive imbalance is further reflected in the team makeup for this year, which has just 10 female swimmers but 22 male swimmers.
The team is currently training in two camps in Lodz and Ostrowcu Swietokrzyskim. Below is a list of swimmers attending the camps (Poland has not declared whether this will be the final roster or not):
