Today we had a chance to talk with World Championship Team member, Michael Klueh. He is a former Texas Longhorn and eight-time World University Games medalist. Last year, he qualified for his first Short Course World Championship Team, where he won a gold medal in the 4x200m freestyle relay.
This is Klueh’s first time on the Long Course World Championship team. He qualified for the team after finishing seventh in the 200 freestyle at the World Championship Trials. “This is everything I have trained so hard for, it is the reason that I wake up in the morning.” Klueh also gave a lot of credit to his teammates at Club Wolverine and the University of Michigan along with the coaching staff that he has worked with for the last 11 months. “It is great to always have 10-15 guys pushing you in practice. There is always someone to chase down, someone to push you and make you better.”
Over the past few weeks, the team has a lot of fun in Spain. They flew into Bilbao but spent a majority of their time in a small town about 45 minutes outside of Bilbao called Vitoria. Michael described this as “taper camp.” As a swimmer, there is nothing that sounds more appealing than taper camp.
He is really looking forward to not only his swim in the 4x200m freestyle relay, but also watching his teammates swim. “Everyone has been looking really good in the water over the past week, I am very excited to see how fast the guys in the Red, White, and Blue swim.”
The first race of the World Championships in the pool starts on Sunday, July 28th.
