Yannick Agnel Breaks European 800 Free Record in Morning Heats

French swimmer Yannick Agnel, after his World Record performance on Thursday in the 400 free, was back in action Friday morning in another event that we never thought we’d see him swim in any sort of serious meet: the 800 free.

For the record, we can only find history of Agnel swimming the 800 free, in either short course or long course, 8 times in his career. The best of those swims until today 8:04.66.

Today, in Angers, he swam a 7:29.17 against mostly junior swimmers to destroy the old French (Sebastien Rouault – 7:39.96) and European (Federico Colbertado of Italy in 7:31.18). That put him 25 seconds faster than anyone in the morning, and though we’ll have to await results of finals, it’s unlikely that anybody’s going to touch that time.

Agnel ripped out early, swimming a 52.93 on his first 100. He then slid into a trio of 57’s, and wound his way back down to a 56 and a 54 to finish. As compared to his balanced 400 yesterday, where he was very even-split across, this was a very up-then-down splitting.

By 100:
52.93
57.00
57.21
57.14
57.04
56.60
56.50
54.75

Full meet results available here, more after finals.