American swimming superstar Michael Phelps has bowed out of the potential double on Saturday morning at the 2015 Arena Pro Swim Series at Charlotte. While he held both entries through the release of heat sheets on Saturday morning, Phelps declared a false start (aka, no-showed) the 100 backstroke.
The meet timeline left him only about a 45-minute turnaround between the two races, and Phelps was visibly struggling to get out of the pool after swimming a 2:00.64 in the 200 fly. The 200 fly is an event that, until now, he’s avoided in his comeback (he hadn’t raced it since the 2012 Olympic Games), although he said that he expected pain in the race.
That 200 fly time was Phelps’ slowest since 2011, a period where he publicly admitted that he wasn’t working as hard as he would have liked, although all indicators are that he’s doing the opposite now, and it’s general training fatigue that led to the slower time in Charlotte.
With the ‘B’ flights remaining, and nobody likely to bump him, Phelps sits as the 6th qualifier so far in the 200 fly, which would put him into the ‘A’ final.
The great MP did not false start; he simply chose not to race; it is pretty normal for a swimmer to choose not to swim a race;
fernanda – “Declaring a false start” is the same as “choosing to not swim a race,” it’s simply the mechanism by which a swimmer “chooses not to swim a race” after the scratch deadline has passed.
He didn’t even swim it..
Read again the part that says “aka no show”