The Top-seeded Danish women will hope to capture their World-Record-setting relay success from last year’s European Championships again on Friday evening in Doha.
This foursome is earning some stability and some camaraderie now with a stable relay for a couple of years from long course to short course and back, and they earned the top seed in prelims with the team of MIe Nielsen, Rikke Moeller-Pedersen, Jeanette Ottesen, and Pernille Blume.
The time was a 1:46.76 – slower than the 1:45.92 they went at home a year ago at the European Championships to set the World Record.
Denmark are undeniably the favorites in this relay, but the Americans weren’t far behind in the morning (1:46.82) thanks largely to the back-half of their relay that was about seven-tenths faster than Denmark, albeit in different heats.
The times, however, were crunched together by the fact that the Americans cut their relay exchanges very close (on average, .09 seconds), whereas Denmark was a little safer (.39 seconds). Claire Donahue had a fantastic swim for the Americans on the fly leg, but expect that Denmark’s Jeanett Ottesen can match that in finals.
The key for the Americans will be how well their anchor can swim, and that’s the one spot where they made the change. One veteran, Natalie Coughlin, will take the place of another veteran, Amanda Weir, who was a 24.04 in prelims. Coughlin will need to emulate the 23.55 that she split in prelims on the mixed 200 medley on Thursday for the Americans to have a chance at the upset – and she will likely be swimming from behind in the effort to do so.
Don’t sleep either on the third-seeded Brazilians, who were about half-a-second back in prelims. Brazil has been on-fire in their relays at this meet, and they have at least a second to be gained on their backstroke leg from Etiene Medeiros alone.
Brazil has also swapped in Daynara de Paula and Larissa Oliveira on the back-half of their relay, which makes them just as likely to challenge Denmark as are the Americans.
China stayed put with their relay as the tied-for-4th-seed, but the Russians with which whom they were even in prelims made one very important change to catch the leaders: they dropped Margarita Nesterova from the backstroke leg (she was the slowest of the 8 teams that finaled on the backstroke) and replaced her with Daria K Ustinova. It will be up to Ustinova to give her team some positive momentum and see if they can finish the relay well.
Denmark would love to have the luxury of changing our relay 🙂