Aussie sprinter Jamie Jack made noise at the 2025 US Summer Championships in Irvine last week. On day 1, he took victory in the 50 free over US Olympians Hunter Armstrong, Caeleb Dressel, and Brooks Curry, posting matching 21.63s in prelims and the final. But Jack still thought there was more in the tank.
Taking a day of rest on Day 2, he time trialed the 50 free on Day 3, swimming a 21.43 to make him the 5th fastest Australian man in history and tie for 4th in the world this season.
After returning home, Jack sat down with SwimSwam to discuss his season between Australian Trials, where he was 21.8, and US Champs. The SPW product said he discussed a plan with coach Dean Boxall that focused just on the 50 free (only for the rest of the season). That also included training with Cam McEvoy and his coach, Tim Lane, in the lead-up to Irvine.
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Reading between the lines he is focusing more now on the 50 free given he feels he has achieved more results with his 21.4 PB… i never realised that 50m free and 100m free sprint training is looking more like a dichotomy lately
I read a quote a few days ago saying he would focus on the 50 for this year but his goal is to make the 100 free relay next year. So I doubt he is done with the 100
I think he still expresses intention to do 100s. Hopefully he can be a 50 specialist that can contribute to 100 relays like Meg. It helps so much to have backup options for the many relays there are.
We’ll have to see how things evolve after this year
Meg only focused on 50 this year. She’s going back to 100 next year. She confirmed this with Cate Campbell in an interview.
Yes I saw that. But I think there’s high value in aiming for 50m, with the intention of also being able to contribute in the 100m relays. It gives the top 100m swimmers more rest if they don’t need to do heats. I think Team Aus got burned a bit by that in Singapore and it showed when we got to the mixed
We’d normally have enough depth for Meg to skip the mixed free relay but no Shayna and Liv not progressing because she got glandular fever kind ruined things. Hopefully by next Worlds things should be back to normal.
Liv was also sick and unable to swim on the day of the mixed free relay so she wouldn’t have been able to be used even if she did progress more this year
Has anyone actually found out what happened to Wunsch towards the second half of the meet? Was she affected by that gastro bug as well ?
That’s true. But I don’t think it’s the women that let us down in that mixed free relay heat. Our men’s stable wasn’t deep enough where we had to resort to a tired Kai and Max (who is also inconsistent). Flynn and Kyle had done so many swims by that point.
I don’t know why Harrison Turner wasn’t used (who came 5th in 100m trials) or even Sommerville could’ve done better
Let’s hope so.. I just worry slightly that he might end up like that other self confessed 50 specialist Isaac cooper
It’s sounds like he’ll do something like what Cam was originally planning to do leading into Paris.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he ends up moving full time to Tim Lane if he wants to fully embrace that McEvoy mindset
I m confident he’ll still do 100m for the LA cycle but by Brisbane he might fully specialise (will be 29 by then, fairly old for swimmers)
Who will break the 50fr WR first? McEvoy, Dressel, Crooks, or someone else? Is age a factor in this event? Maybe it won’t be anyone who is top ranked right now. Some up and coming junior potentially?
Crooks is “taking a break”, I think.
Dressel and McEvoy – they are exceptional but still have PBs a bit off the WR.
I think an up and coming junior in 5 or so years will do it.
Crooks is back to training – I can’t remember who but it was on some Tennessee swimmers Instagram story
That can’t be right. Why would he take a 3 month break and make an announcement out of it
He’s training. Or at least he was in L Taylor or N Blackmon’s instagram
I think that go 20.90 you need to be basically perfect. Cielo’s 50 was definitely stronger than his 100 wr
Sadly I think that Dressel’s may have been in 2020-2024, but with the pandemic delay, training for swimming 6 events in 2021, and his time off from training after that, he may have missed his window. Doesn’t mean he can’t still win or even PB! But his PB is still 0.13 off which is a lot at that speed.
I do think that if McEvoy had the first 15m Dressel did he might have been able to get it, perhaps swimswam could do an analysis on that in the future? But age will creep up on him.
Then… Read more »
I might get clowned on this but I think that if Alexy fixes that start and focuses more on the 50 someday, he’d be a contender to break the WR.
His 50 looks like it could be so much faster.
I don’t think his start is very fixable. It’s tied to his physique just like Gretchen’s.
it’s more his 15m split that needs work, at least get through his underwaters without being half a body length back on best of the best. For as much as GWs reaction time gets brought up her underwaters preserve so much speed she’s always first to 15
That’s true. But if you train SCY your whole life and still have average UWs then it looks like you don’t have the physique for that either. Alexy’s sweet spot is the 100 because he can correct for the technical issues with his phenomenal freestyle technique and huge amplitude. As an aside, with very few exceptions the greatest UW swimmers are always natural butterfliers.
That said, I do think he can realistically get down to as low as 21.1 but that’s some time away from the WR.
Yup this.
Cate Campbell had notoriously slow RT for a sprinter (0.8), despite going 23.8 and 52.0
Many people thought she could fix it.
She couldn’t.
Taller swimmers have more inertia.
If Alexy maintains this rate of improvement through 2028, he could be in contention even with an average start. The dude is 6-8 and an absolute beast.
Crooks has improved his technique a lot. Early in his NCAA career I recall watching his stroke and thinking he was just purely an underwater swimmer with some tempo. He may be capable of SO much better in LCM than he has had the opportunity to show. If he had trained thru Worlds I bet he would be in the 21 low range by now.
Would love for it to be Cam but not sure it’ll happen. Dressel doesn’t seem like a realistic possibility. Crooks LCM PB is more than 0.6 off the WR so not sure he’s in the conversation at all for now
Crooks won’t get anywhere close if I’m being real.
“Trained”
Yes, training
I swear this is relay names’ alt. account, I guess both are as annoying as each other.
Nah he didn’t copy/paste the entire Wikipedia article on the word sarcasm so you would be 100% sure of what he was talking about as per usual
Murica is a different person.
Also xenophobe as relay names. Then again, many Americans are xenophobes these days.
Isn’t making sweeping pejorative generalizations about a group of people based on their country of origin the definition of “xenophobia”?
You just blew my mind. Xenoception.
John Lennon:
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Livin’ life in peace
I mean, it isn’t really wrong to say “many” though🤷🏻♂️
It is very ironic that you are the one saying this when you regularly do this lol
Exactly lol
Link?
Rare TTTE L
This is my theory as well. When Masse started to slow down with age they were both obsessed with calling her washed. And Murica once used the term “calendar year” which I don’t know about you, but there’s only one person on this site I’ve ever heard say that.
Yep that calendar year thing was what made me think they were the same person
I need Dressel on a flight to Australia yesterday
Sent with a sonic 6