The HardCoreSwim of the week goes to Arizona’s Kevin Cordes for his 1:48.68 in the 200 breaststroke on the final day of the 2013 Men’s NCAA Championship meet.
Cordes’ swim broke the NCAA, American, and U.S. Open records in the race, making it the fastest 200 yard breaststroke swim in history. His splitting in the race was absolutely phenomenal: he took the swim out in 52.19. Even had there not been another 100 yards to go, that would’ve been good enough to place in the top-8 in the individual 100 breaststroke. Even after blowing through such a grueling and energy-sapping front-half, he still came home in 56 seconds. There’s a lot of people who train really hard just to get a single 100 yard breaststroke that fast.
Ya know when you’re playing John Madden video games, and your quarterback throws for 800 yards and 9 touchdowns in a game? This Cordes swim was the equivalent of that. In real life.
More shockingly, Cordes is just a sophomore. Not a sophomore who went to a year of prep school, took a gap year after college, had a summer birthday and stayed back a year when he started kindergarten. He is a true sophomore – and a young one at that: only 19 years of age.
The hottest topic of discussion in American swimming, now, beyond Ryan Lochte’s upcoming reality show, is how Cordes’ success will carry over to long course. I don’t think that anybody believes at this point that it’s going to truly translate into a 2:05 long course (at least not yet), but could he come close to a World Record this summer? 2:07.01? It’s certainly feasible.
For now, though, we bask in the afterglow of a swim that broke through barriers that it didn’t even seem like we were close to.
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