Sunday, July 31, 2005

Is Roland superhuman?

Wow! Another Gold in the prestige race of the World Championships - the 50m free style. Winning the equivilent of the 100m in athletics allows Roland Schoeman to now title himself the fastest swimmer in the world.

Schoeman, who boasts the quickest reaction time off the blocks, led from the start to clock 21.69sec — the second-fastest time in the world.

It beat Alexander Popov’s 21.92 championship record, but not the Russian’s world mark of 21.64.

Ryk Neethling again featured well, winning bronze.

Schoeman appears to have matured since his Olympic outburst (relating to the pay of SA swimmers) and is now playing a mentoring role amongst the SA team. His has been training with backstroker Gerhard Zandberg, who missed the 2005 World Championships because of poor form at the national trials earlier this year. But Schoeman rates him as one of our top prospects.

Schoeman agrees with the decision not to enter a relay team due to the lack of form swimmers to make up the two positions behind Ryk Neethling and himself.

Given our small size and resources, isn't it fantastic to have two of the top swimmers in the world. Hopefully we can gain ground (or should that be water?) on Australia in the pool - a country that dominates far beyond what should be the case given its 18 million population.

Well done boys!!!

4 comments:

andrea said...

Canadians are pretty happy about their showing, too, considering the disaster at Athens. There was some major re-shuffling in the coaching dept. and it seems to be working ... so far ...

It is the question said...

Yeah, it's great to see the people representing you doing well.

In South Africa we have found that the stock maret improves after wins by our sportsmen.

Anonymous said...

Where can I to learn abt it in detail?

Anonymous said...

OMG! Thank you for this.