Femke Heemskerk Swims Meet Record in 200 Free on Day 1 of Dutch SCM Champs

Meet Live stream, via YouTube:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=BMeDROaSEFs

Femke Heemskerk’s swim in the women’s 200 free final on Friday evening in Tilburg, the first of the 2014 Dutch Short Course National Championships, was a classic Heemskerk charge-the-start swim.

She swam a 1:51.75 en route to an over four second margin of victory, which just missed her own Dutch National Record of 1:51.72 set three weeks ago at the International Swimming Festival.

Heemskerk was out on an incredible 53.80 – much, much faster than she was in the National Record breaking swim, giving high hopes for her 100 free later in this meet (she was a lifetime best in that event three weeks ago as well in 51.6).

She and Hungarian Katinka Hosszu are separating themselves from the world a little bit in this race, while there are still many of the world’s top 200 freestylers who have yet to race SCM this year. The swimmer most likely to challenge them is Emma McKeon of Australia, who won three gold medals at their short course nationals today and still has the 200 free to come later this weekend.

Heemskerk was the star of this meet, though Maake de Waard was impressive in a new lifetime best of 27.15 in the 50 backstroke. She held off Kira Toussaint, who is the National Record holder in 100 SCM but living and training in the collegiate system in the United States now is at a different point of her training.

Sebastiaan Verschuren won the men’s 200 free in 1:45.37 – the Netherlands men’s deepest event at the moment. In what seems to be an ever-refreshing cycle for the country in this event dating back to the great Pieter van den Hoogenband, another good young swimmer is coming up behind Verschuren: 18-year old Kyle Stolk. He broke the National Junior Record with a 2nd-place swim of 1:46.50.

Ferry Weertman (1:46.72) and Joost Reijns (1:46.80) were close behind in 3rd and 4th, respectively, as was another teenager Maarten Brzoskowski in 1:46.81.

Inge Dekker, returning from a wildly-successful World Cup series, won the women’s 100 fly in a new Championship Record of 56.51. While the record will be a nice tag to her resume, she was immaculately consistent at 56.0’s throughout the seven-meet World Cup.

Para-Finals

Aside from Heemskerk, the biggest news out of this meet was the success of the Dutch para-team, which looked motivated coming off of a year where they hosted the 2014 European Championships.

In total, the group broke 3 World Records, 4 European Records, and 8 National records in the meet.

The three World Record swims were:

• Lisa Kruger, women’s 200 free, S10, 2:14.37
• Marlou van der Kulk, women’s 50 back, S14, 31.51
• Mark Evers, men’s 100 back, S14, 1:02.99

The 14-year old Kruger also got the European Record in the 50 back in 32.41.

Full, live meet results available here.