The HardCoreSwim of the week this week goes to USC Trojan and Russian international Vlad Morozov and his 100 freestyle from the Russian National Championships. His 47.93 made him the first swimmer of 2013 to go under 48 seconds in long course, and continues his trajectory toward an international podium.
Since having an explosive Short Course World Championship in December, where he won the 50 and 100 free, and the NCAA Championships in March, where he broke the NCAA Record in the 100 free and had some unprecedented swims, there have been a lot of questions as to whether Morozov could repeat his success in long course.
The early answer: yes. That time, if repeated in Barcelona, probably wouldn’t medal. For his second taper in a month, and third in four months, it was pretty impressive.
I had an interesting phone conversation earlier this week with our photographer Tim Binning (besides being the best swim photographer on earth, he’s a huge swim geek), about the possibility of Morozov uncovering sort of a new methodology of swimming. In the last two years, Morozov spent a huge chunk of time back home training in Russia (see him discuss it in this interview with Garrett McCaffrey) where he started out doing some high volume sets, before transitioning to more Salo-like sets. Perhaps we’ll learn that there’s some value to swimmers of putting in bigger two-year cycles with seemingly unrelated training methodologies, beginning with high volume workouts, and then finishing with a year of more Salo-like race specific, power training. Maybe we don’t know what we’re talking about, but it was a fun conversation. It definitely seems to point to the value of working with more than one coach, in some sort of planned or sculpted mega-cycle, to achieve positive results.
That’s neither here-nor-there, however. Vlad’s swim stands alone as quite an impressive feat. Perhaps this summer, he can take a stab at another big record…that 21.64 in the 50 free set by Alexander Popov in 2000.
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yes indeed – a very HardCoreSwim! World Champs are going to be exciting for sure…
Correction:
Popov did not swim 21.64
He swam it at Russian trials.