2024 BUCS LONG COURSE CHAMPIONSHIPS
- Friday, February 23rd – Sunday, February 25th
- Ponds Forge International Swimming Center, Sheffield, England
- LCM (50m)
- Meet Central
- Draft Entries
- Results
Day two of the 2024 British Universities & Colleges (BUCS) Long Course Championships took place tonight in Sheffield and several head-turning performances wowed the Ponds Forge crowd.
Racing in the men’s 800m freestyle, double world champion Daniel Wiffen fired off a big-time result of 7:43.03 to take the event by over 30 seconds.
Wiffen of Loughborough looked smooth and in control in his follow-up from winning this event in a time of 7:40.94 in Doha.
Another world champion was in the water, as 20-year-old Loughborough teammate Freya Colbert took on her bread-and-butter 400m IM.
Colbert clocked a time of 4:40.15 to get to the wall first, coming within 3 seconds of her gold medal-winning outing of 4:37.14 from Doha.
Stirling’s Katie Shanahan was next to the wall in 4:44.50 while Beatrice Varley of Plymouth rounded out the BUCS podium in 4:49.04.
Max Litchfield, who snagged 400m IM silver at this year’s World Championships, won that event here tonight in Sheffield.
The 29-year-old Olympic finalist posted a result of 4:13.58 to establish his dominance. The next-closest swimmer was Loughborough’s Charlie Hutchison who settled for silver in 4:20.40.
Litchfield, who represented Great Britain internationally for the first time since the Tokyo Olympic Games, earned runner-up status in Doha in a result of 4:10.40, the 2nd-fastest time of his career.
Kornelia Fiedkiewicz was another winner on the night, with the 23-year-old Loughborough speedster taking the women’s 100m free.
Fiedkiewicz stopped the clock at 54.58 (26.25/28.33) to tie her 6th-quickest performance to date. Behind her was Evie Davis in 55.84 while Bath’s Jemima Hall also landed on the podium in 56.20 to put some Bath points on the board.
Stirling’s Angharad Evans continued her momentous improvements on her way to becoming BUCS champion in the women’s 100m breast.
After splitting 1:06.06 on last night’s 4th-place-finishing mixed medley relay for Stirling, Evans fired off an individual 1breast effort of 1:06.65 tonight for gold.
Evans opened in 31.48 and brought it home in 35.17 to crush her previous personal best of 1:07.27 notched at December’s Rotterdam Qualification Meet.
Before Rotterdam, 21-year-old Evans had never been under the 1:08 barrier and now the on-the-rise athlete has broken the 1:07 threshold.
Evans’ 1:06.65 now rockets her up the British all-time rankings to check in at slot #6. Her time would have placed 7th at the World Championships in Doha.
Sophie Hansson put up 1:06.94 for silver behind Evans while Tatiana Belonogoff registered 1:07.11 as the bronze medalist.
Additional Winners
- Alex Cohoon of Loughborough was the fastest men’s 100m freestyler, registering a gold medal-worthy 49.62.
- Stirling’s Keanna MacInnes topped the women’s 50m fly field in 26.69, registering a new Scottish national record in the process. Her outing overtook her previous Scottish standard of 26.73 logged at the 2023 Geneva Challenge.
- Last night’s 100m backstroke victor Oliver Morgan of Birmingham doubled up with the top prize in the 200m back this evening. 21-year-old Morgan touched in 1:57.81 as the sole sub-2:00 swimmer of the field. He owns a lifetime best of 1:57.17 from last year’s British Swimming Championships.
- Loughborough’s Greg Butler produced a mark of 1:00.63 to take the men’s 100m breaststroke gold.
- The women’s 200m back saw Honey Osrin turn in a time of 2:08.48 as the only racer under 2:11 in tonight’s final. The 21-year-old Loughborough ace scored a new personal best with this result, surpassing her prior PB of 2:09.08 from the 2023 British Summer Championships.
- Fleur Lewis of Loughborough won the women’s 800m free this evening in 8:40.93.
- Bath’s Josh Gammon came within striking distance of his lifetime best en route to winning the men’s 50m fly. Gammon touched in 23.75 to fall just .22 off his PB of 23.53 from last year, a time which rendered him GBR’s 5th-best performer in history.
Wiffen vs Hafnaoui vs Finke in the 1500 and Short in the 800 is going to be electric in Paris.
There are going to be so many insanely close and competitive races at the Olympics that we will surely see many world records completely collapse.
I hope that the fraud Biedermann loses his 400 free world record this year.
How is he a fraud? Everyone at the time had access to super suits?
We all hope for WRs to go down. But Biedermann wasn’t a fraud. He was unfairly helped (as many others were) by the suits but he was a dam good swimmer. He was sub 1:45 without a suit. Nothing fraudulent about that.
This is laughably false.
Biedermann’s 1:44.88 is good, but is not remotely comparable to his 1:42.00 or his 3:40.07. He is a complete fraud when it comes to having his name at the very top, which he was never good enough to do without the suit.
Definitely in the mix for gold in the 1500 but I wonder whether he has the opening speed tk match Hafanaoui and Short in the 800. He’d be having to swim not that far off his 400PB to be with them at halfway when they’re swimming 3:46