Blueseventy Swim of the Week: Guy Tries Fly, Thrives

b70_520x70-r10

Disclaimer: BlueSeventy Swim of the Week is not meant to be a conclusive selection of the best overall swim of the week, but rather one Featured Swim to be explored in deeper detail. The BlueSeventy Swim is an opportunity to take a closer look at the context of one of the many fast swims this week, perhaps a swim that slipped through the cracks as others grabbed the headlines, or a race we didn’t get to examine as closely in the flood of weekly meets.

Maybe the most impactful international development of the past week was James Guy‘s successful branching out into the butterfly races.

Guy has been Great Britain’s 200/400 freestyle pillar for several years now, but his continued improvement in butterfly is giving Great Britain’s medley relay an increasingly dangerous lineup. Guy swam the 100 and 200 fly at the Japan Open over the weekend, blasting big times in both. Probably most impressive was his season-best 51.50 in the 100 – a time that sits 3rd in the world ranks for the season. Guy also tied his season-best in the 200 fly with a 1:55.91 – that’s the 12th-ranked time for the season.

That comes after a 2015-2016 in which Great Britain had no swimmer rank inside the top 25 in the 200 fly, and only Guy sitting 19th in the 100.

If Guy keeps improving, the Brits will have one of the faster-rising swimmers in the world for three of their four medley relay legs. Duncan Scott is blowing up in the freestyles, and Adam Peaty is the biggest single-leg advantage of any medley swimmer worldwide right now. Peaty can outsplit the next-best swimmers in the world by perhaps two seconds on the breaststroke leg, and Guy is quickly putting himself among the better fly splits. In Rio, Guy had the third-best fly split in the field, with the key outlier Michael Phelps now officially in retirement.

Great Britain still has to improve its backstroke leg (where they lost almost two full seconds to the Americans last year), but Guy’s butterfly improvement curve has Great Britain just a step away from medley relay dominance.

WE MAKE SWIMMERS.

There isn’t a second that goes by when the team at blueseventy aren’t thinking about you. How you eat, breathe, train, play, win, lose, suffer and celebrate. How swimming is every part of what makes you tick. Aptly named because 70% of the earth is covered in water, blueseventy is a world leader in the pool and open water. Since 1993, we design, test, refine and craft products using superior materials and revolutionary details that equate to comfort, freedom from restriction and ultimately a competitive advantage in the water. This is where we thrive. There is no substitute and no way around it. We’re all for the swim.

2016 blueseventy banner for Swim of the Week b70_300x300-aftsVisit blueseventy.com/pages/swim to learn more.

Instagram: @blueseventy

Twitter: @blueseventy

Facebook: facebook.com/blueseventy

blueseventy is a SwimSwam partner.

In This Story

1
Leave a Reply

Subscribe
Notify of

1 Comment
newest
oldest most voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
marklewis
6 years ago

His butterfly is still not as good as his freestyle. It does help the GB medley relay.

At the big meets, I guess he could swim the butterfly events after the freestyle events are over.

About Jared Anderson

Jared Anderson

Jared Anderson swam for nearly twenty years. Then, Jared Anderson stopped swimming and started writing about swimming. He's not sick of swimming yet. Swimming might be sick of him, though. Jared was a YMCA and high school swimmer in northern Minnesota, and spent his college years swimming breaststroke and occasionally pretending …

Read More »