Kyle Chalmers Delivers 45.16 Championship Record For 100 Free Gold

2022 FINA SHORT COURSE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS

• Tuesday, December 13 to Sunday, December 18, 2022
• Melbourne Sports and Aquatics Centre, Melbourne, Australia
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One of the most highly-anticipated races of these Short Course World Championships did not fail to disappoint, as the men’s 100m freestyle saw a stacked field battle it out in Melbourne.

As with the women’s 100m free, the host nation of Australia topped the podium tonight, with Kyle Chalmers getting to the wall first in a time of 45.16, a new championships record.

Frenchman Maxime Grousset kept it within .25, touching in 45.41 for silver while Italy’s Alessandro Miressi brought home the bronze in 45.67.

All told, the field all finished within one second of one another, with the top 7 racers all producing sub-46-second outings tonight.

As for Chalmers, his speedy 45.16 overwrote the previous Championship Record of 45.51 Russian Vlad Morozov put on the books in 2014. The Aussie sliced .35 off of that longstanding record to add another gold to the hefty tally the host nation has collected thus far.

Chalmers’ result this evening crushed the 45.57 Miressi put up in Abu Dhabi to take the meet title one year ago.

King Kyle owns the World Record in this SCM 100 free event, having produced a massive mark of 44.84 during the 2021 FINA World Cup. That overtook the previous storied World Record of 44.94, a time Frenchman Amaury Leveaux put on the books over a decade ago in 2008.

Last month Chalmers made no qualms conveying his goal of adding this Short Course World Champion title to his lengthy resume.

“I have been the Australian champion, the Oceania champion, the junior world champion, the Commonwealth champion, the Olympic champion … but there are two more things I want to achieve, which is the world short-course championship and then the [long-course] world championship. I have two big boxes I want to tick so I can retire happily. So, I get the opportunity to tick one of those boxes off in front of a home crowd, and to have my family up in the crowd will mean the world to me.”

It’s important to note that Chalmers has had a series of heart surgeries since Rio, all addressing his Supraventricular Tachycardia (SVT). He also underwent shoulder surgery in November 2020.