Winnington adds individual bronze in Indianapolis

 

  

Swimming Australia: August 25, 2017: After anchoring the men’s 4x100m freestyle relay team to bronze on the first night of finals at the World Junior Championships in Indianapolis, rising star Elijah Winnington was back on the podium tonight, this time for the men’s 200m free.

Winnington, who trains at Bond University on the Gold Coast dropped almost two seconds from his personal best time to hit the wall in third place in a time of 1:46.81.

This time was just 0.02 off silver in Indianapolis, and would have been fast enough to take the win at the 2017 Hancock Prospecting Australian Swimming Championships in April ahead of Mack Horton; which is a great sign of depth for our men’s freestyle ranks.

Winnington said his coach helped to calm his nerves and stick to his race plan.

“I was very nervous but I called my coach back in Australia who again told me to ‘trust the process’ which gave me confidence in the work we had done,” Winnington said.

“I knew I went out quite quickly but I was able to build the third 50 and then the last 50m is all about heart and I gave it my all and was able to bring home a medal.”

The gold medal went to Russia’s Ivan Girev (1:46.40) with Nandor Nemeth from Hungary sneaking into the silver medal position ahead of Winnington in 1:46.79.

In other events…

In the women’s 100m freestyle semi-finals 16-year-old Eliza King was 10^th overall, stopping the clock in a time of 55.65

Following on from his lead off swim in the bronze medal winning relay team last night, Jordan Brunt was back in the water for the men’s 100m butterfly semi-final and the 17-year-old from Southport clocked a personal best time to move through as fourth fastest for the final in 52.84.

In the men’s 100m breaststroke Zac Stubblety-Cook finished sixth overall in 1:01.14 with his pet event, the 200m breaststroke still to come.

Swimming in her first international final, Chelsea Hodges was seventh overall in the women’s 50m breaststroke with a time of 32.12.

Swimming Australia would like to acknowledge the support of the Commonwealth Games Association for providing funding to youth athletes through its NextGEN Squad program.

The sixth FINA World Junior Swimming Championships will be held in Indianapolis, USA from 23 – 28 August 2017. For more information go to: http://www.fina.org/content/6th-fina-world-junior-swimming-championships
 
The event will be live streamed at: https://www.finatv.live/en/competitions/2017-indianapolis-sw-wjch