This week, we’ve been witness to some very fast swimming at the Russian National Championships in Moscow, with a top-10 time going down in over half of the events through four days of competition.
Like many other countries, notably the Brazilians, the Russians have raised their standards for automatic qualifying for this summer’s World Championships in Shanghai. Since language barriers often makes these standards tough to find, we wanted to share the Russian qualifying standards with our readers, so that they can be kept in mind through the last few days of the National competition. These times are all roughly 1-2% (.7-2.5 seconds, depending on the length of the race) faster than the FINA A-standards.
The Russian coaches and federation have the discretion to take an event champion or runner-up if they are close to these standards.
| Men’s Cuts | Women’s Cuts | |
| 22.14 | 50 meter free | 25.35 |
| 48.82 | 100 meter free | 54.57 |
| 1:47.82 | 200 meter free | 1:58.33 |
| 3:48.93 | 400 meter free | 4:09.35 |
| 7:58.73 | 800 meter free | 8:35.39 |
| 15:11.52 | 1500 meter free | 16:30.21 |
| 25.30 | 50 meter backstroke | 28.40 |
| 54.40 | 100 meter backstroke | 1:00.82 |
| 1:58.48 | 200 meter backstroke | 2:10.93 |
| 27.69 | 50 meter breaststroke | 31.67 |
| 1:00.79 | 100 meter breaststroke | 1:08.51 |
| 2:11.74 | 200 meter breaststroke | 2:26.89 |
| 23.77 | 50 meter butterfly | 26.45 |
| 52.36 | 100 meter butterfly | 58.76 |
| 1:56.86 | 200 meter butterfly | 2:09.37 |
| 2:00.17 | 200 meter IM | 2:13.36 |
| 4:16.47s | 400 meter IM | 4:41.75 |