2017 BRITISH NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIPS
- Tuesday, April 18th – Sunday, April 23rd
- Ponds Forge International Sports Centre, Sheffield
- LCM
- Qualifying Times Analysis (for this meet)
- Qualifying Times Analysis (for 2017 World Championships GBR squad)
- Meet Site
- Live Stream
- Psych Sheets
The best of the best in British swimming will be descending upon Ponds Forge International Sports Centre beginning on Tuesday, April 18th. With minimal top-tier retirements post-Rio, the squad that saw its best Olympic performance in decades is mostly in-tact, which means we’ll see some fierce racing in Sheffield over the course of the 6-day meet. At stake are spots on the GBR roster for the 2017 World Championships in Budapest, only granted upon meeting the nation’s selection criteria.
“Truly seeing this first major domestic meet as the kick-off of the next quadrennial, British Head Coach Bill Furniss says, “Rio 2016 is history now. It was a great result for us but we are now at the start of a new cycle, we’ve pressed the reset button and we’re moving on.”
“What we have to realise now is that we’ve had a successful four-years and with that comes higher expectations. We need to learn to do it all over again but better than we did before. That has to be our philosophy from day one. We need to learn to win after winning.”
Key names taking to the pool include reigning 200m freestyle world champion James Guy, double silver medalist Duncan Scott, untouchable world record holder Adam Peaty, as well as silver medalists Siobhan-Marie O’Connor and Jazz Carlin.
Peruse through our entry list analysis to pick out your own favorite races to watch starting Tuesday.
The selection criteria allows the NPD and Head Coach to select wild cards for the team, before anyone who doesn’t finish 1st in a time faster than table 1. So British Swimming are guaranteed medal potential swimmers who perform well at trials, as well as those who have a poor meet / are ill etc, without breaking the terms of the selection policy. It’s a clever way of making it look like people have to swim super quick to qualify, when in reality it allows those in charge to hand pick the team that they think will help the team win medals (in the men’s 800 Freelay for example) 😀
Lols see Rio performance to tell you why they choose these times, it’s almost as if they know what they are doing.
Not really.
They already had the great Peaty to begin with. Regardless of qualifying times, GBR was assured 1 gold.
2015 Kazan (Olympics events only): 3 golds, 1 silver, 2 bronze.
2016 Rio: 1 gold, 5 silvers.
I dont know whether tougher qualifying times made any difference.
SMOC made a great progress, while it was surprising, it was not as shocking as progress made by many other medalists.
Their men 100-200 freestylers swam what’s expected from them while Duncan Scott made the biggest progress (even if James Guy failed to medal, because we knew he was not really a favorite anyway).
Jaz Carlin finally swam the times that she should have done in Olympics/world championships.
They still got it right. Great selection criteria.
As ever, pointless qualifying times. Why use such times when pretty much anybody within the ‘B’ times will probably qualify anyway?
Think it must also be demoralising for a lot of swimmers, to have qualifying times in some events a fair bit quicker than the British record. I’m all for quick qualifying standards, but I feel like it’d be better if they just had one time and stuck to it rather than have these outlandish qualifying times and then the consideration times.