Caeleb Dressel didn’t match his seven-gold tally of 2017 but became the first swimmer to take eight medals in one world championship meet as the U.S. men took silver in the 4x100m medley relay, the last men’s race of the world championships in Gwangju, South Korea.
The U.S. women capped their late surge in the championships with individual golds for Lilly King and Simone Manuel, followed by an emphatic world-record swim in the 4x100m medley relay in which breakout star Regan Smith set the tone in the backstroke before handing off to King, Kelsi Dahlia and Manuel.
The Sunday successes added to a late rally for a U.S. team that ran away with the overall medal count as usual but suffered a series of setbacks earlier in the week, including an illness than wiped out much of Katie Ledecky‘s week as well as some puzzling performances in a handful of events that are typically U.S. strongholds.
The Americans finished with 27 medals and 14 golds, down from their haul of 38 medals and 18 golds in 2017. Australia was second in the medal standings with 19 medals and five golds.
Dressel wound up with six gold medals: 50m freestyle, 100m freestyle, 50m butterfly, 100m butterfly, men’s 4x100m freestyle and the mixed 4×100 freestyle. He took silver in both medley relays — the men’s 4x100m and the mixed 4x100m. The 50m butterfly and the mixed 4x100m freestyle are not on the Olympic program.
In 2017, Dressel missed out on the medals in the 50m butterfly but took gold in all four relays in addition to his other three individual medals.
The women’s relay opened with Smith, a high school student from Minnesota who’ll start college at Stanford after the Olympics next year. The 17-year-old swimmer broke out on the international scene earlier in the week with a world record in the 200m backstroke semifinals and followed up with a convincing win in the final. She lived up to expectations in the relay with a world-record backstroke leg of 57.57 seconds.
“There’s nothing better than diving in with a body-length lead already,” King said.
King extended the lead to nearly three seconds. Dahlia, a 100m butterfly bronze medalist in 2017 under her maiden name of Kelsi Worrell, kept the lead around the same margin while Canada passed Australia to move into second place.
The only questions left on the freestyle leg were whether Australia’s Cate Campbell could surge past Canadian star Penny Oleksiak for silver and whether Manuel could wrap up keep the U.S. women under world record pace. The answer on both counts was yes, with Manuel swimming a leg of 51.86 seconds for a final time of 3:50.40, more than a second off the record the U.S. women set in 2017.
“To start off with a world record from Regan, I think that really pumped us all up,” Manuel said.
Olivia Smoliga swam in the heats for the medley relay to earn her third medal and second gold of the meet.
Dressel did all he could in the men’s relay, pulling the U.S. team from fourth to first with the fastest butterfly time (49.28) by more than a second in his last race of a busy week.
Ryan Murphy, who was fourth in the 50m backstroke earlier in the evening, stayed close to Russian multimedalist Evgeny Rylov, and breaststroke specialist Andrew Wilson handed off in fourth place amid a tightly bunch lead group.
Dressel handed off to Nathan Adrian, a much-decorated freestyle veteran who has rebounded from treatment for testicular cancer earlier this year and anchored the winning 4x100m freestyle relay earlier this week. Adrian held off the charge from Russia, but Duncan Scott, the subject of an angry outburst from China’s Sun Yang at a medal ceremony earlier in the week, posted the second-fastest freestyle split of all time to give Great Britain the gold.
Earlier Sunday, Manuel inched past a loaded field in the 50m freestyle to win in 24.05 seconds, 0.02 seconds ahead of Swedish star Sarah Sjoestroem and 0.06 ahead of Australia’s Cate Campbell. Denmark’s Pernille Blume finished within 0.07 seconds of Manuel but missed out on the podium.
The medalists were the same, albeit with Campbell and Sjoestroem reversed, as they were in the 100m freestyle earlier in the week, when Manuel won from all the way out in Lane 1 after a slow time in the semifinals.
In the first women’s final of the evening, King won her final showdown with Russian Yuliya Efimova in the 50m breaststroke. King, who holds the world record of 29.40, finished in 29.84, barely outtouching 14-year-old Italian Benedetta Pilato, (30.00) who burst into tears as King reached over to congratulate her. Efimova was third in 30.15.
“The girls next to me really gave me a good race,” King said.
Like Manuel, King also won the 100m race in her discipline. King also won both events in the 2017 world championships and won the 100m in the 2016 Olympics but was denied a shot at a breakthrough in the 200m after being disqualified in the preliminary heats.
Jay Litherland took a surprising silver in the men’s 400m individual medley, in which top American Chase Kalisz failed to qualify two years after setting the championship record in the event. Litherland, a bronze medalist in the 4x200m freestyle relay in 2017, was 3.34 seconds behind Japanese favorite Daiya Seto heading into the freestyle leg but closed to within 0.27 seconds at the finish.
“I can’t explain it,” Litherland said. “That was a fun race.”
In the first final of the evening, South Africa’s Zane Waddell, who swims at the University of Alabama and won an NCAA title this year in the men’s 4x50m medley relay, stunned the Russian and American favorites in a tightly bunched finish in the men’s 50m backstroke.
Waddell finished in 24.43, just ahead of Evgeny Rylov (24.49) and world record-holder Kliment Kolesnikov (24.51).
Murphy (24.53, fourth) won the 100m and 200m backstroke in the 2016 Olympics but has never claimed an individual world title. He took silver and bronze in 2017 and then silver in the 200m backstroke earlier this week.
Michael Andrew (24.58, fifth) has the unusual distinction of qualifying for the final in every 50m race of the week, though he was unable to crack the podium in any final.
“What was nice about not hitting every mark was the motivation it gives me going into Tokyo,” Andrew said.
Germany’s Florian Wellbrock won the men’s 1,500m freestyle in 14:36.54. No U.S. swimmers qualified for the final.
Hungary’s “Iron Lady,” 30-year-old Katinka Hosszu completed a quadruple-double, winning the 400m individual medley title for the fourth straight time after doing the same in the 200m medley earlier in the week. U.S. swimmer Ally McHugh was sixth.
Hosszu also swept the medleys in the 2016 Olympics and won the 400m race back in 2009.
Other swimmers with large medal hauls in the championships included Australia’s Campbell (two individual medals, three from relays) and Ariarne Titmus (three individual, one relay), Russia’s Rylov (three individual, two relay) and Efimova (three individual), Great Britain’s Adam Peaty (two individual, two relay), and Canada’s Kylie Masse and Sydney Pickrem (two individual and one relay each).
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Chase Kalisz, the world’s best all-around swimmer in 2017 and 2018, gave up that title at the world championships this week.
Kalisz, after taking 200m individual medley bronze on Thursday, ended his worlds by failing to qualify for the 400m IM final on Sunday. He finished 10th among the preliminary heats.
Kalisz entered worlds ranked No. 7 in the world this year in both IMs. But in 2017 and 2018, he was fastest in those events, sweeping the world titles in 2017 and Pan Pacific titles in 2018.
Kalisz was fueled this Olympic cycle by taking silver in the 400m IM at the Rio Olympics, ending the U.S.’ run of five straight golds in the event among Tom Dolan, Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte.
Now he goes into the Tokyo Olympic year having to deal with Japanese star Daiya Seto, who won the 200m IM on Thursday and qualified first into Sunday’s 400m IM final. The Rio Olympic 400m IM champion, Japanese Kosuke Hagino, struggled since Rio and took this summer off.
Unless Jay Litherland upsets Seto in the 400m IM final on Sunday, Caeleb Dressel will be the only U.S. man who goes into the Olympic year as a reigning world champion in an individual Olympic event, albeit in three events.
In the last quad, Lochte was the only U.S. man to go into the Olympic year as a reigning individual world champion in the 200m IM. Then the Americans starred in Rio with titles from Anthony Ervin and two each from Ryan Murphy and Phelps.
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DES MOINES, Iowa — Blake Leeper, a Paralympic medalist and double amputee, finished fifth in the 400m at the USATF Outdoor Championships on Saturday. Normally, that would put a runner on the world championships team for the 4x400m relay.
But Leeper, who hopes to be the second double amputee to race at worlds after Oscar Pistorius, is in a legal battle with the IAAF regarding the eligibility of his prosthetic legs.
He was allowed to run conditionally at USATF Outdoors for a second time in three years. USATF gave him a card inviting him to team processing after Saturday’s final, but a spokesperson said it awaits the result of his IAAF case.
“It’s out of my control. I put the work in, the rest is up to the rest of the world,” Leeper said. “I do encourage everybody that is following my story, that do support me, to go out there and voice their opinion and push the barriers a little bit in my support so, hopefully, the tides could turn in my favor and I could compete in the world championships.”
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Pistorius won a legal battle to race on his prosthetics at the 2011 World Championships and 2012 Olympics in the 400m with a personal best of 45.07. He was eliminated in the semifinals at both meets.
Leeper said after Friday’s semifinals, where he lowered his personal best to 44.38 seconds (which would have easily made the 2016 Olympic team), that he would have been eligible for able-bodied worlds two years ago.
“They keep changing the rules,” said Leeper, who is coached by, among others, Super Bowl champion wide receiver Willie Gault. “For somebody to try to dictate and tell me how tall I should be or whatever I should be running on I think is just really unfair.”
When asked about Leeper’s case, an IAAF spokesperson emailed Saturday:
The IAAF competition rules state clearly that mechanical assistance to athletes is not allowed during athletics competitions, unless the athlete can establish on the balance of probabilities that the use of an aid would not provide him with an overall competitive advantage over an athlete not using such aid. Whilst Blake Leeper is able to participate in the USATF sanctioned Championships his results will not be ratified, because the athlete has not provide an evidence to IAAF that meets the rule stated above nor have the blades been classified under the new MASH formula (Maximum Allowable Standing Height).’
In 2018, the International Paralympic Committee said Leeper was running on invalid blades for its record purposes because he had yet to be classified under a new maximum allowable standing height (MASH) formula. An IPC spokesman said Saturday that he does not believe Leeper’s status has changed, so his recent times have not counted.
Michael Norman, was was second in the 400m and is the favorite for worlds, said he had no issue racing with Leeper. But others in the past, when Pistorius became the first double amputee to race at worlds and the Olympics, said they wouldn’t have been so sure had Pistorius been running the kind of times that Leeper has posted the last two years.
“Walk a mile in my legs,” Leeper said of those who believe he has a competitive advantage. “Understand the things that I go through as a double-leg amputee. There’s some days my legs are swollen, they’re sore, they’re bleeding, they’re bruised. I can’t even have the strength to put ’em on to walk to the bathroom.
“Anybody that faces a disability, to actually look them in the face and say they have an advantage is just crazy to me. I guarantee if that’s the case, you’ll see a lot more people amputating their legs and coming and trying to qualify for the U.S. trials.”
Leeper was born without lower legs and has used prosthetics since he was a toddler. He earned 200m bronze and 400m silver (behind Pistorius) in his class at the 2012 London Paralympics, then served a cocaine ban.
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2019-07-28 11:21:00Z
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