WORLD RECORD TITMUS SHOULD ALREADY HAVE
ARIARNE Titmus wants to officially claim the world record that she should already have in her possession — but has been robbed of the title by swimming’s bumbling officials. The double Olympic champion already has the 400m freestyle record after knocking Katie Ledecky off her perch and now she wants the 200m record she deserves. If swimming was fair dinkum, Titmus would already have the record, but the clueless FINA officials who allowed the sport to be hijacked by super suits more than a decade ago, dropped the ball. Despite being warned what was coming, they stood back and did nothing as some of the greatest records in swimming were sunk by competitors aided by suits that provided extra buoyancy. Those suits were later banned, but shamefully, the records set in them were allowed to stand, torpedoing some of the sport’s greatest achievements and denying future generations their places in the history books. The oldest record in women’s swimming is the 200m freestyle mark of 1:52.98 set by Italy’s Federica Pellegrini at the infamous 2009 world championships in Rome. Considered untouchable for 13 years, suddenly it’s under siege from Titmus, who has twice come within half a second of breaking it, going 1:53.09 at last year’s Olympic trials then 1:53.31 at the Australian championships in May. The Terminator has made no secret she wants the record and has another great shot at breaking it on the opening day of swimming finals at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham.
“That’s definitely a big goal of mine,” she told News Corp. “But I’m not going to prioritise it though because if I really think about it, it’s not going to happen. So I just need to keep training the way I have and hopefully that’s going to make me better.” Aussie swim fans love Titmus because she fights like a tiger in the pool and she calls things as they are on dry land. And when it comes to Pellegrini’s record, Titmus is spot-on when she says the reason it’s been so hard for anyone to break is because the Italian got a helping hand from the now-banned outfit she wore.
“The suit definitely helped her in the back end,” Titmus said. “Her last 50m was insane, so if you‘re right on the (world record) line with 50m to go there’s no way that you’re going to get it.
“Every time I’ve been close to it, you go back and watch the race and I’m half a body length in front of it with 20m to go and then just the extra buoyancy made her last part of the race just incredibly fast.”
If the tainted supersuit times were wiped from the books, Titmus would hold the fastest three times in history, but currently sits in second, third and fourth place.
The trick for Titmus is pacing the race to perfection. Because she is not a natural speedster, her best work comes in the second half of the race, but to combat Pellegrini’s, she also needs to go out fast and keep enough in reserve to charge home.
“It is possible but for me to go out quicker in the 200m, it takes a lot more physical exertion than for the specialist 100m swimmers,” she said. “To be going out as fast as them on the first 100m in the 200m free, that’s really motoring for me, so it’s about trying to make that as easy as possible so that my back end can be there.
“It’s an incredible record and it’s no wonder it hasn’t been broken.
“Even the times where I have come close, I’ve been really happy with the races, but it’s just an incredibly fast time.”