Feb. 17, 2008 - Who said you can’t swim fast in the morning? Certainly not Kirsty Coventry, the former Olympic gold medalist who added “world record holder” to her impressive credentials yesterday at the Missouri Grand Prix.
With the normal meet schedule flipped around to simulate the schedule for the upcoming Beijing Summer Olympics - prelims in the evening, finals in the morning - Coventry proved that records can go down before the sun.
Yesterday morning at the Mizzou Aquatics Center, Coventry smashed the 18-year-old world mark in the women’s 200-meter backstroke, finishing the same event in which she won gold at the 2004 Athens Olympics in 2 minutes, 6.39 seconds. Coventry, who lives and trains in the United States, topped the world record of 2:06.62 set by Hungary’s Krisztina Egerszegi in August 1991.
That wasn’t the only long-standing record toppled during the Missouri Grand Prix’s first of three finals sessions. After coming within a second of breaking Janet Evans’ 20-year-old American record in the women’s 400 freestyle during Friday night’s preliminaries, Katie Hoff eclipsed the mark yesterday, finishing in 4:02.20.
Evans’ previous record of 4:03.85, set during the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, was the longest-standing U.S. swimming record. In fact, the record had stood longer than Hoff has been alive. Hoff, the youngest member of the American Olympic team at the 2004 Athens Games, turns 19 in June.
In the 200, Hoff defeated five-time Olympic medalist Natalie Coughlin for the second time in two days with a gold-medal winning time of 1:56.08.
But Natalie was breaking records too. She swam the 100-meter backstroke in 59.21 seconds Sunday, breaking her own women’s world record. Coughlin, who won five medals at the 2004 Olympics, set the mark during a preliminary race in the competition.
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