Sylvia Statkevicius Breaks Ruta Meilutyte’s Lithuanian Record at Canadian Olympic Trials

2024 CANADIAN OLYMPIC & PARALYMPIC TRIALS

• May 13-19, 2024
• Toronto Pan Am Sports Centre – Toronto, Ontario
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16-year-old Etobicoke Swim Club swimmer Sylvia Statkevicius broke the Lithuanian Record in the 200 meter freestyle on Tuesday morning at the Canadian Olympic Trials.

Statkevicius swam 1:59.13 to place 6th in the heats and break the record of the country’s most-famous swimmer, Ruta Meilutyte. Meilutyte swam 2:00.11 in 2014 at the British Championships – like Statkevicius, she grew up living and training mostly in another country, in her case Great Britain.

While Meilutyte is best-known as a breaststroker (she won Olympic gold in the 100 breaststroke at 15 in 2012), she was also a very good freestyler early in her career.

Improvement Splits Comparison

The splits comparison shows Statkevicius getting much more aggressive in this race, opening up a second-and-a-half faster than she did in April at the Canadian Open, which was her previous personal best. She held on through the 150 before falling back to the pace a little on the last 50.

In total in 2024 so far, her best time has dropped from 2:01.86 to 2:00.20.

Statkevicius was already the Lithuanian Record holder in the 800 free (8:55.23) and 1500 free (17:27.11) in long course and the 200 free (1:57.23) in short course.

She has represented Lithuania at the 2024 World Championships, the 2023 European Junior Championships, the 2023 World Junior Championships, and the 2022 World Junior Championships, and the 2021 European Junior Championships

Because of meet rules, international swimmers like Statkevicius are not eligible to swim in “A” finals at the Canadian Olympic Trials. Instead she will swim in the “B” final, where up to three non-Canadians are allowed to compete. With World Aquatics saying that there are unlikely to be invites for Olympic “B” standard swimmers, Statkevicius is still chasing Olympic qualification in that “B ” final, where the target time is 1:57.26.

Her club ESWIM is one of the top developmental clubs in the country. That is where the early development of Summer McIntosh, one of the world’s top swimmers, began, as an example among many.