Swimming LEN Junior European Championships 2018

[phelps 7,675]

9 ore fa, OlympicsFan ha scritto:

So far the overall level has been rather disappointing indeed. Of course Milak, Kolesnikov and Kesely are only doing as much as they have to. Apart from those 3 i don't see many talents who are likely to become world-class. Of course it doesn't help that talents like Anderson, Large, Gose, Shkurdai or Minakov don't seem to have improved much lately. I think especially in men's IM and women's freestlye sprint/back/fly the situation is worrying from a european point of view. We didn't have many breakout performances so far, i don't really see any on the women's side so far and on the men's side i would say only Daniel, Dean and maybe Burdisso (although for him it has been more of a breakout year, i am not sure whether his 200 fly time was even a PB for him). For me clearly the most positive thing has been to see that Israel suddenly has some great talents, especially in men's freestlye, but also in women's 200 IM. Switzerland also has been surprisingly good. The biggest disappointment so far has been Spain. Men's 200 m free tomorrow should be great.

From a german perspective the biggest disappointment has been men's 100 fly and there weren't many positive surprises to be honest. The weakness on the men's side is worrying, the same is true about the non-existent improvements of Gose and Tobehn (the two biggest talents in this age group).

 

yeas, I agree...

it's obvious that Kolesnikov and Milak are totally focused on the major Europeans and they're here just to grab the medals with the minimum effort, so I wouldn't mind too much about their timings...

about Burdisso, Friday's time over 200m (fly) is his PB (actually, the new Italian junior record), but his time over the 100m is a lot slower than last week in Rome (but it was only a semifinal, let's wait and see what he does in the final)...

about the people becoming world class in the future...it depends on what we want to consider "world class"...if we think about future Olympic Gold medallists I guess that only Milak and Kolesnikov have the stuff for that, meanwhile I'm not convinced at all by Kesely...I see her more like a Kapas kind of swimmer rather than a new Ledecky...so, very good, but not so dominant...

here in Italy there are also a lot of expectations on Thomas Ceccon...I don't know what's up with him this week, but he's clearly not even close to his best shape (he's a 53.x swimmer over the 100m back, well below the 2-min mark over the 200m and he also has a 1.54 time over the 200m medley in the short course, so I can't explain what's doing right now -he's even a lot worse than last year)...

moreover, they say he still has to build all of his muscles (in fact, he's 2m tall and still very slim and with a childish looking, so I think he still has big growth margins)...

let's see if they're right or he's just another burnt talent (like many others among the young Italian swimmers in the recent past)...maybe he's gonna be one of those late comers (relatively, he's only not yet 17 years young) who are quite usual to Italian swimming (and sport in general)...

[phelps 7,675]

and now it's game over...

 

as we wrote many times, it was quite a sub-par edition off the European Juniors, with very few great talents, who were also not totally focused on the event, doing just what they did need to grab the medals they expected to win...

 

for Italy (for us the shame of getting no gold medal, despite the 14 podium places, 4th highest number overall), it was one of the worst appearances at the EJCs in the last 15/20 years, with Ceccon looking more or less a phantom, Burdisso not swimming the clockings we expected from him and the remaining boys and girls doing what they could, but not really rising to the occasion...

 

last day's champions:

 

Men's 400m Medley: Maksim Stupin, 4.16.79

Women's 100m Backstroke: Daria Vaskina, 59.90 (best performance of the day)

Men's 100m Breastroke: Vladislav Gerasimenko, 1.01.36

Women's 100m Breastroke: Kotryna Teterevkova, 1.08.03

Men's 200m Freestyle: Kristof Milak, 1.47.19

Women's 200m IM: Anastasiia Sorokina, 2.14.38

Men's 100m Fly: Kristof Milak, 51.78 ( Burdisso is 3rd with 52.88, after swimming 51.73 in Rome last week )

Women's 50m Fly: Anastasiya Shkurdai, 26.44

Men's 50m Freestyle: Bjoern Seeliger, 22.27

Women's 4*200m Free Relay: Hungary, 8.02.24

Men's 4*100m Medley Relay: Russia, 3.35.58

 

in the final medal table, Russia dominate the field with 18 Golds, followed by Hungary with 12.

Great Britain, despite a final day without success, keep the 3rd spot with 6 Golds.

Lithuania and Sweden enlarged the Gold medal club to 9 Countries (a more reasonable spreading, if compared to the early days).

 

Full Medal Table here:

http://ejc2018.microplustiming.com/indexEJC2018_web.php?s=TG9hZE1lZGFscygpOw==&cat=ASM&page=045&spec=005&bat=001&td=CGR1&hg=19:08&descIT=TWVuIC0gNHgxMDAgbSBNaXN0aSAtIEZpbmFsZQ==&descEN=TWVuIC0gNCB4IDEwMCBtIE1lZGxleSAtIEZpbmFs&descFR=SG9tbWVzIC0gNHgxMDAgbSBRdWF0cmUgTmFnZXMgLSBGaW5hbGU=&curCatSel_M_F=&sport=Swimming

[Werloc 3,164]

A nice way to end the championships. I've had my eye on Teterevkova for a while as she slayed competitions in Lithuania and she often beat Agnė Šeleikaitė, whom was a medalist in junior events as well, whilst being many years younger than her. This is definitely not the new Meilutytė, because I doubt that she might swim as fast, but Meilutytė is on a tremendous spiral of disappointing results, so I wouldn't be surprised if in a couple of years, Kotryna is going to be our number 1.