Birmingham confident Keith can make history
NATIONAL coach Paul Birmingham believes swimmer Keith Lim can become the first Malaysian to dip under the 23-second mark in the men’s 50m freestyle.
Keith did well to post 23.10sec at the recent Monaco leg of the Mare Nostrum series in Europe to break the national record. The previous mark was 23.17s set by Alwyn Tan in 2015.
Birmingham said he expects more from Keith in the 50m, 100m and 200m distances in the future.
“I wouldn’t say I was surprised, I always knew he had the ability to do that time. He could go on to become the first Malaysian to go under 23 seconds as well,” said Birmingham.
“At 20, he is still very young and has a lot of room for improvement. We are going to focus a little bit more on the 200m event as I believe he has more potential over that distance.
“But having said that we will be working on all the sprint events in general, I want to see improvements in 50m, 100m and 200m races.”
On Welson Sim’s progress, Birmingham said the swimmer will continue putting in the hard yards in training in the remaining weeks until the Indonesia Asian Games in August.
Welson did well to win two silver and a bronze at Mare Nostrum though his timings were nothing to shout to about with the focus being on the Asian Games.
“Mare Nostrum is quite competitive with many world and Olympic medallists competing, so he (Welson) did well to earn medals there.
“He was probably where we were expecting him to be in terms of timing. His times were similar to what he did at the same meet last year.
“I think he needs to put in a little more work over the next six weeks. Our training before Mare Nostrum was general but now we will be working on more race-specific training until the Asian Games.
“We will be tapering about a week out this time. We tried a longer taper for the Commonwealth Games but that did not work out for him.”
Birmingham disclosed that the squad will focus on training in Bukit Jalil ahead of the Asian Games.