About 23 hours had passed between Katie Ledecky’s world-record-setting swim Monday morning in the women’s 1,500-meter freestyle preliminaries and her prelim heat Tuesday in the 200-meter freestyle.
Advertisement
“I appeared to be only just even that focuses on this morning’s swim”, she let it be known.
China s Sun, the reigning 400, 800 and 1500m world champion and record holder over the mile, clocked three minutes 42.58 seconds to win his final by more than a second as Britain s James Guy took silver.
Another record seems within reach in the final later Sunday at the Kazan Arena, where a temporary pool has been set up inside a football stadium.
Underneath the surface though, is an unforgiving competitor, who is already so much better than the competition in the longer distances that she now measures much of her success in times and records broken rather than medals and championships won.
Swimming kicked off at the 2015 FINA World Championships in Kazan, Russian Federation on August 2 as four event finals -two relays and two individual races- were contested in the pool.
It was the third time she’d broken the 1500m freestyle world record, but the first time she’d done it without trying.
The men’s 400 free is the first of four finals Sunday night.
Roughly a dozen of Ledecky’s American teammates moved down from the top of the grandstands and cajoled a taciturn security guard into letting them reposition themselves in a corner closest to the starting blocks so she could better hear their cheers.
The doping case appears to have slowed down Sun a bit. Franklin turned in a remarkable performance at that meet, becoming the first woman to break the 1-minute-40-second barrier in the 200-yard freestyle on her way to one of her three individual victories.
South Africa’s 100m butterfly world champion Chad Le Clos opened his Kazan campaign by comfortably qualifying for the men’s 50m semi-finals as eighth fastest behind France’s Laurent Manadou and Hungary’s Laszlo Cech, who were the fastest through.
How does she feel on a scale of 1 to 10?
Of course, for Katie Ledecky, going easy in the 1,500 final just means everyone need be on heightened alert for another world record. “(The fans) helped me go faster”, Efimova said.
“I went through a hard time and met a lot of difficulties”, said Sun, who had proved his innocence.
Advertisement
Sarah Sjoestrom of Sweden set a world record in the semifinals of the 100-butterfly. The 11-time Olympic medalist has faith in a group that is missing Michael Phelps, who is banned from the meet as punishment for a second alcohol-related driving arrest previous year.
