There were lots of excellent swims on day 4 of the World Championships. Phelps broke through with his first gold medal, in the men’s 200 fly. Sun Yang set an all-time textile-best in the 800 free, and in the process cleared the best time of Grant Hackett who is easily one of the 5 best male swimmers ever. Felipe Silva’s 50 breaststroke swim was awesome, if only it hadn’t been marred by a very-illegal finish.
But for day 4’s best swim, I’m going to go straight to my generation’s greatest source of information and public-pulse: Twitter. There was one swim on this day that really got Twitter’s heart racing, and for a change it wasn’t even Michael Phelps. It was Italy’s Federica Pellegrini. So popular were Tweets about her after her swim, that her name was actually trending World Wide on Twitter for about 10 minutes.
For those who aren’t in the “Twittersphere”, something trends when at that particular moment, lots of people are writing Tweets about it. This means that sufficiently enough Tweets were being written about Federica globally for it to occupy space on a level with the end of the NFL lockout, which was also trending at the time.
It’s hard to ignore that kind of attention, but let’s look at the swim on its own merits. That gold medal gave Pellegrini two firsts: it made her the first swimmer in the meet to win two golds, including individual and relay races; and it made her the first woman to ever win the 200 free more than once at a World Championship (and she did it in consecutive events: 2009 and now). No woman has ever done it at an Olympics, either.
This puts her in rare company for any swimmer. The list of swimmers who have trended globally on Twitter and won multiple titles in a single World Championships in any event: If I had to guess, it would be three-strong. Michael Phelps, Ian Thorpe, and Federica Pellegrini.
Click here to watch Pellegrini’s championship swim, and be amazed by how-far back she comes from to win the race.
Federica Pellegrini has been nominated for the United States Sports Academy’s 2011 Athlete of the Year honor. The 27th annual award is done in conjunction with USA Today and NBC Sports. You can vote online through Dec. 24 at this link – http://ussa.edu/ballots/athlete-of-the-year#
Based on the swimming merit only, Sun Yang’s definitely the swim of the meet yesterday. He broke textile WR, while Pellegrini did not.
You said Pellegrini did her from behind, but have you seen Sun Yang’s split? He was was behind Hackett’s WR line, and super negative splitting his race in 3:51+ and 3:47, that would be like if Adlington split 4:10 and 4:05 to break janet evans’ textile WR.
Can you not see how incredible Sun Yang’s swim was?
Chad Latourette and Morgan Scroggy were real sick for a couple days. i don’t tweet
a little easier for Pellegrini to be trending when finals start at noon in Rome and at 6 am on the east coast…
How did you not notice that Michael Phelps was trending at the same time?? Twice in fact! First when he won the 200fly and then again later when his Today Show interview aired!