Blueseventy Swim of the Week: Campbell Returns To Relay Heroics

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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.

Before this week, the fastest women’s 100 free split in world history was 51.59 – barely more than a tenth faster than the 100 free world record from a flat start.

That relay split time was plenty fast, relatively speaking, when it was done. When Australia’s Cate Campbell split 51.5 at the 2014 Commonwealth Games, 52-second individual times were rare. In the years since the ban of the super-suits, Campbell’s 52.33 from 2013 was the fastest 100 free time in the world, and only four women had broken 53 seconds since the suit ban.

But boy have times changed.

In the calendar year 2018 alone, 9 women broke 53 individually, and one – Sweden’s Sarah Sjostrom – broke 52 individually. The world record was lowered (courtesy of Sjostrom) to 51.71, and Campbell’s relay split record was looking like a relic from a bygone era.

Until this week.

In her first Commonwealths performances since that 2014 season, Campbell blasted a 51.00 anchor leg for Australia, helping her team break the world record in the 4×100 free relay (3:30.05) and setting a new high-water mark for 100 free speed in the same way her 2014 swim did.

Based on that stellar split, and Campbell’s propensity to swim very well in domestic competition, we could be seeing another assault on the individual 100 free world record later this week on the Gold Coast.

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.

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Bon Jovi
5 years ago

why didn’t y’all include the time?

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 …

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