In what his coach described as a “part of his training”, Danish swimmer Viktor Bromer decided to swim butterfly in the 400 freestyle this past weekend at the West Danish Championship in Aarhus.
Bromer recorded a time of 4:13.7, holding a nice consistent pace throughout. His 200 splits were 2:06 and 2:07.7. The swim reinforces the fact that Bromer’s biggest strength in the 200 fly field is his endurance. Bromer had a comparable back half of his 200 to Chad le Clos at this past summer’s World Championship in Kazan. He finished 5th.
Bromer’s coach, Eyleifur Johannesson, said he wanted to push Bromer out of his comfort zone, even it meant swimming far longer in butterfly then he would ever have to. The swim piques curiosity as to how fast the other best 200 butterfly swimmers would fare if they made a similar attempt.
Bromer is one of a small group of Danish swimmers that pre-qualified for the Olympics last summer, via his results in Kazan. He posted a 1:55.98 this past November that has slightly ahead of Michael Phelps in the current world rankings.
I watched a Masters swimmer in Houston swim a 1500 fly against 18 year olds doing Free at a “A” and up meet and he got third in his heat. Keep in mind these were some of the fastest swimmers in Texas, most at their pre-college peak.
A master swimmer from Madrid (Héctor Ramírez, aged 22 at the time) took over seven hours to cross -swimming only fly- in 2013 the Strait of Gibraltar (8 nautical miles between Europe and Africa). No one else has tried it. No walls there. http://www.marca.com/2013/09/08/mas_deportes/natacion/1378670267.html
In 2002 I told my squad who were aged 13yrs old that they were going to do a T20 and it was their choice of stroke, young Pippa said ok coach I will be doing Butterfly and she did ? I hope you are reading this Pip ????????????
My guess is Mike Brunner did it back in the late 70’s….he did just about everything else!!
In the late 80’s I used to spend a couple of weeks each summer at the Longhorn swim camp. I don’t know if it’s still tradition, but they used to have every camper do a long course 400 fly each week of the camp, including the 8 year olds. Eddie gave campers the option of doing more if you wanted to and over the few years I was there were always a few trying to one up the record. My last year, there was a boy who went 5600 meters fly non-stop before they pulled him out of the water. Eddie said he could have gone all day. 400 was enough for me!
And then there’s this guy 🙂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KI-s43a5vAo
Doesn’t count. It’s short course meters.
Thanks for all those details. Didn’t know that.
It seems crazy. And awesome at the same time. Less crazy in short course with all the walls but in long course….
They have all survived? 🙂
Supposedly Mary T did it in ~1983, swimming in a men’s 1500 heat, and went under 18 minutes. See comments in http://swimswam.com/lessons-from-legends-mary-t-meagher/ . Pretty awesome.