Sarah Sjostrom of Sweden missed out on breaking her own world record in the 50 fly this evening in Kazan and had to “settle” for only breaking her own championship record.
Tonight she won the gold medal in the women’s 50 fly at the 2015 FINA World Aquatic Championships in a time of 24.96, exactly 0.10 faster than the championship record from semi-finals. She touched 0.38 seconds ahead of the second-place finisher, Jeanette Ottesen of Denmark.
Sjostrom smashed the world record in this event back in June at the Swedish Championships with a time of 24.43, but didn’t come close to that mark this week in the middle of a very busy week of racing.
Of course, the world championships are more about winning medals than setting world records, and Sjostrom has been doing plenty of the former. She won the 100 fly earlier this week and earned a silver medal in the 100 free.
Her gold medal in the 50 fly tonight is her fourth world championships gold medal and her sixth overall.
Later tonight she’ll be competing in the semi-finals of the 50 free. She had the third-fastest time in this morning’s preliminaries, so she should easily advance through to finals and be in the mix for a medal tomorrow evening.
Sjostrom had previously broken Dana Vollmer‘s world record in the 100 fly in both the semi-finals and finals earlier this week.
The world record is good she will have to settle for gold at the championships. Especially when 50 fly is towards like the end with a lot of races in the system. Imo, there is a good chance she will never top that WR herself. But I do think we’ll see a lot more sub 24.8 times.
50m Butterfly (italian tv)
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x30vbis
impressive race from Sjöström but her world record is so good that it leaves you expecting more from her 😀