Olympians make solid start at Oceania swim champs
New Zealand’s weary Olympic swimmers produced some strong performances on the opening morning of the Oceania Championships in Christchurch today.
All made it through from this morning’s heats for tonight’s final against 11 nations at the QEII Leisure Centre.
Corney Swanepoel was fastest in the heats of the 50m butterfly, Helen Norfolk (pictured) and US-based Lauren Boyle were first and second fastest in the 200m freestyle, Liz Coster and Melissa Ingram were fastest in the 100m backstroke and Moss Burmester quickest in his favoured 200m butterfly.
The Olympic squad have returned yesterday from a hard training camp in Australia for the championships which feature swimmers from Australia, Cook Islands, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Marshall Islands, America Samoa, Tahiti, Samoa, Palau and hosts New Zealand as well as Hawaii and New Caledonia.
Hawaii’s Shanelle Choi was fastest in qualifiers for the women’s 50m butterfly and Australia’s Robert Hurley, who narrowly missed qualifying for Beijing in the backstroke, was fastest in the heats of the 200m freestyle and his favoured 100m backstroke.
Hurley set a Championship record in his heat clocking 1:49.62 while Coster also set a new Oceania mark, beating her own record with her heat time of 1:02.19.
Tonight’s finals start at 6.30pm with the preliminaries for the synchronised swimming from 1pm.
