A team of American IPC swimmers continue their European tour this weekend in Berlin, Germany and superstar Jessica Long began her meet with a new World Record in the S8 women’s 100 fly.
In prelims, the 22-year old Long swam a 1:09.60 for the top seed. That broke her own World Record of 1:09.79 set at last year’s IPC World Championship meet.
In finals, Long couldn’t quite match her prelims mark, but she was under her old record for the 2nd time with a 1:09.73 to win the multi-class final.
Long is another member of the NBAC ‘super group’ that Bob Bowman has assembled in Baltimore and is clearly one of the top training groups in the world right now. Her world record follows the pattern that her teammates are having at the Mesa Grand Prix, where the NBAC women, especially, have looked very good on Thursday.
Editor’s note: a multi-class final means that swimmers’ times are compared to a table for their specific classification and assigned a point value. The highest point value wins, so the fastest time doesn’t always get the gold.
Long was trailed by another S8, Britain’s Stephanie Slater, who swam a 1:10.01 to break the European Record and take 2nd. She could be the one to challenge Long in Rio, as she’s still young enough to be on the upward-slope as well (only 23).
S10 Oliwia Jablonska took 3rd in a new S10 European Record of 1:08.52; that tied her in the scoring column with S11 Maja Reichard of Sweden.
The other World Record of the first day in Sweden went to Hungary’s Reka Kezdi in the same event. The S5 swimmer went a 1:51.96. She too was unable to match that in finals, and took 19th overall in the multi-class system.
Other World Records to go down include Britain’s Oliver Hynd, who was a 2:10.43 in prelims of the 200 free. That breaks the 2010 record of 2:10.59 set by China’s Yinan Wang at the Paralympic Games; Wang actually did his swim as a split en route to the 400m gold medal in a race where Hynd was the silver medalist.
Hynd then lowered that record again with a 2:08.71 in finals, though there he only took 2nd by the multi-class rankings with Iceland’s Jon Margeir Sverrisson, classed in S14, swimming a 2:00.11 for the win.
Norway’s Ingrid Thunem broke the women’s S1 100 backstroke World Record with a 2:32.46, despite finishing over a minute behind the first finishers. That took out the World Record that had belonged to Britain’s Danielle Watts by over 29 seconds. After that absolute destruction of the World Record in prelims, she almost comically took .06 more off in finals, just for good measure.
Germany’s Torben Schmidtke took out the SB6 men’s 200 breaststroke record with a 3:01.20, the first World Record of the meet for the hosts.