Breaststroking Beast: Daiya Seto Downs 200 Japanese National Record

2017 FINA WORLD CUP – SINGAPORE

• Saturday, November 18th & Sunday, November 19th
• OCBC Aquatic Centre, Singapore
• SCM
• Prelims 9:30am local/Finals 6pm local
• Startlists
• Day 1 Recap
• Day 2 Recap
• Results

Japanese Olympic medalist Daiya Seto earned the 3rd highest amount of points among men in cluster #3 behind overall World Cup Series winner Chad Le Clos of South Africa and runner-up Vlad Morozov of Russia. Seto’s dominance came in his specialty IM events, where the 23-year-old destroyed the World Cup records across both the 200m and 400m distances.

However, Seto also made his mark in what was once his ‘off’ event of the 200m breaststroke, tonight time taking silver in a new Japanese national record setting-time of 2:01.30. Splitting 27.88/30.89/31.26/31.27, Seto fell just .12 shy of taking gold head of Russia’s Kirill Prigoda, who earned a Russian national record for his efforts. Instead, Seto settled for a new personal best, obliterating his own career-fastest of 2:03.81 from the Beijing World Cup last year.

In fact, Seto’s outing tonight would have rendered the Japanese dynamo a silver medal behind Germany’s Marco Koch at last year’s short course World Championships in Windsor, not too bad for typically having been a fly and IM specialist.

However, we’ve reported before how Seto is making moves in this discipline, taking the individual breaststroke events more seriously as of late. He quietly produced a solid 2:04.57 at the Australian Short Course Championships in October of this year, another mark that would have finaled in Windsor.

Both Seto’s and Prigoda’s results from Singapore now position the athletes among the top 5 SCM 200 breaststrokers ever. For IMer Seto, already an incredibly strong flyer, strengthening his breaststroke is only going to make the man more deadly once Tokyo 2020 rolls around.

Top 5 Performers in 200 Breaststroke All-Time, Worldwide:

1. Marco Koch (GER), 2:00.44, 2016
2. Daniel Gyurta (HUN), 2:00.48, 2014
3. Kirill Prigoda (RUS), 2:01.18, 2017
4. Daiya Seto (JPN), 2:01.30, 2017
5. Michael Jamieson (GBR), 2:01.43, 2013