Coach backs Cate’s break

A U S T R A L I A N s w i m m i n g head coach Jacco Verhaeren says he fully supported Cate Campbell’s ( below) decision to have a year off after Rio and says the result of the break speaks for itself after her short course world record last week.

C a m p - bell returned to racing for the first time since her 2016 O l y m p i c d i s a p - pointment by breaking the 100m freestyle world record at the national short course championships in Adelaide.

The 25- year- old swam 50.25secs to take 0.33secs off the benchmark and showed she had regained the hunger to compete ahead of next year’s Gold Coast Commonwealth Games.

“Brilliant, a world record is always special and the margin in which she breaks it after a season where she made some different decisions for all the right reasons is great to see her back on that level and very quickly on the level actually,” Verhaeren said.

“I think she ( Campbell) is very excited and she should be after breaking a world record, but more importantly she is really enjoying racing and training.

“She’s going to do some world cups as well and to create that hunger again and feel like ‘ I’ve got this, I can race’, that has been very important for her.

“She definitely wasn’t the only one ( to have a break after Rio), we had close to 8- 10 athletes making different decisions last year which I was very supportive of.

“It’s a long four years towards Tokyo and sometimes people need to take a step back to be better in the years to come.”