Solid efforts from Twist in comeback

IT was no Hawaiian holiday for Dunedin swimmer Kale Twist last week.

Twist continued his promising comeback to the sport with a series of solid performances, including a recordbreaking swim in a final, at the junior panPacific championships in Hawaii.

The Kiwi club swimmer was one of just three South Islanders in the 23strong New Zealand team.

He opened his campaign with the 100m freestyle in which he posted a heat time of 52.29sec, just outside his personal best, to finish 30th.

Twist then joined Ollie Lutton, Gus Shivnan and Finn Harland in a New Zealand 4x100m freestyle relay team.

The four Kiwi swimmers knocked almost 2sec off their entry time to place fifth overall.

Twist posted an impressive split of 51.95sec on his leg of the relay, more than 0.3sec faster than he recorded in the individual 100m on the previous day.

The former King’s High School pupil then backed up in his favoured event, the 50m freestyle.

He glided through his heat in 23.69sec to qualify for the final, his first in an individual race at an international meet.

The final was close at the end, just 0.17sec separating the fiftheighth swimmers, and Twist finished eighth by a fingernail.

The calibre of the swimmers was indicated by Twist’s time — his 23.47sec was not only a personal best but broke his own Otago record of 23.53sec and also broke the Otago 18 years record (23.81sec, set by Thomas Gold last year).

Twist became the fifth Otago swimmer to compete at the junior panPacific championships.

Olympic finalist Erika Fairweather was fourth in the 400m freestyle at the 2018 meeting in Fiji, Andrew Trembath was fourth in the 100m backstroke in Hawaii in 2014, and both Phoebe Williams and Shane Patience had topeight finishes in California in 2009.

It has been some sort of year for

Twist. He only got back into competitive swimming in 2021 after a hiatus that lasted over a year.

He broke his first Otago open and agegroup records at the New Zealand championships, his first appearance at the meeting, in April, booking his ticket to Hawaii.

Twist then won a bronze medal at the New Zealand agegroup championships.