2012 Olympic champion Ruta Meilutyte of Lithuania has made the decision to return to her home nation to continue her ongoing training. Having spent the past several years under Jon Rudd at the Plymouth Leander club in Great Britain, the breaststroking star has announced she will be moving to Kaunas, Lithuania to be coached by fellow Lithuanian Paulius Andrijauskas.
After blasting onto the scene winning 100 breaststroke gold in London at just 15 years of age, the now-19-year-old Meilutyte suffered a broken elbow in September 2015 and steadily tried to regain form since. She finished 7th in the 100m breaststroke at the Rio Olympic Games last summer. She took a lengthy post-Rio break, traveling to South America, Europe and Lithuania with her brothers and has been back in the water only since December. Meilutyte recently returned to competition via the Flanders Cup this past January, finishing 1st in the 100m breast, in a time of 1:07.03.
With Rudd having moved on to take over Swim Ireland, Meilutyte said she ‘decided she wanted to be in the city I grew up in.’ She said that, “The possibility of going abroad was no longer an option.”
Andrijauskas was a competitive swimmer himself and still holds Lithuania’s national records in the 200m butterfly and as a member of the 800m freestyle relay.
