Best yet to come: swimming star Chalmers

Tuesday, 9 April 2019:

Australian Olympic swimmer KYLE CHALMERS poses during a portrait session in Adelaide, Australia.
Australian Olympic swimmer KYLE CHALMERS poses during a portrait session in Adelaide, Australia.


Dripping wet from his fastest 100m freestyle, Kyle Chalmers makes a stunning admission: he doesn't feel entirely world-class just yet.

"My skills are still things that are lacking," Chalmers said moments after his 100m freestyle personal best on Monday night.

"And I know if I can drop those 0.1 of a second, everything adds up."

It's those fractions of seconds which Chalmers now obsesses over.

"I know that my skills are coming, it's just about practising it every time I do a turn in training," he said.

"We do hundreds of them a day. And you can practise bad skills pretty easily with the amount we do.

"So it's practising those right things and your muscle memory coming into a race - you don't want to be thinking about it too much ,you just want it to happen naturally."

The 20-year-old clocked 47.48 seconds in his pet event at the Australian titles in Adelaide on Monday night.

The time was 0.10 seconds quicker than his previous quickest, his gold-medal swim at the 2016 Olympics.

Chalmers now has the two fastest 100m freestyle times in the world this year - and he's nowhere near peak fitness.

Chalmers woke on Monday feeling a tad flat - the night before, he'd won the national title in a 100m butterfly event he entered just for fun.

So he went for a gentle swim.

"I felt lethargic and heavy in the water," he said.

So Chalmers, in his words, "did everything I could to get myself swimming fast".

Massages. A prolonged stretching routine. And then "a very extended warm-up" of swimming about 2.5 kilometres.

All this comes as Chalmers, instead of tapering for the nationals, trains right through them.

"There's not many things that I want to change," he said.

"But there's probably those few things that are going to come with taper and swimming that bit faster in training."






AAP