Sweden has ‘pre-nominated’ five athletes including world record-holder Sarah Sjostrom to the 2018 Short Course World Championships, the Swedish swimming federation announced this week.
The early roster features two men and three women, with plenty more to be selected through a Swedish national meet in November. Four-time 2018 European champ Sjostrom leads the list. Also nominated:
Louise Hansson has won a handful of medals at Worlds and Euros, all of them on relays. Most recently, she won silver as part of the 4×50 free relay at the 2017 Short Course European Championships in Copenhagen. The 19-year-old Sophie Hansson was a two-time medalist at those championships, taking bronze in the 50 breast individually and gold as part of the 4×50 medley relay. They should pair with Sjostrom to form the backbone of at least the sprint free and medley relays.
Victor Johansson, also 19, swam in the 200, 400, 800 and 1500 frees at last summer’s long course World Championships, though he didn’t make finals or semifinals in any of them. Erik Persson was a semifinalist in the 200 breast at 2017 long course Worlds and was also a 2016 Olympian.
The 2018 Short Course World Championships will take place in Nanjing, China from December 7-11. Sweden will supplement these pre-nominations with a full roster at Sweden’s short course nationals from November 14-18.
What does this mean? Does this mean the “pre-nominees” don’t even have to show up at Swedish nationals and they’ll be on the WC team? I cannot imagine USA Swimming doing something similar. Help me out … what is the purpose / benefit?
It’s a country of barely 10 million people and there aren’t that many elite swimmers to choose from to begin with. It’s pretty easy to predict who’s going to be on a Swedish international team. Why make the elite athletes stress out about making the short course worlds roster if there’s nobody out there fast enough to replace them? It’s not like the U.S. or Australia. Even if these swimmers have an off-meet, there probably aren’t swimmers back in Sweden who could have done significantly better.