The championships in the Olympiisky pool complex, swimming scene for the 1980 Moscow Olympics, produced a cascade of seven world records, with Igelstrom figuring in three and Peirsol in two to earn the accolades of female and male swimmers of the five-day meeting.
Peirsol’s American team mate Lindsay Benko, a picture of joy and disbelief when she saw she had cracked the five-year-old 200 metres freestyle world mark on Sunday, and the Chinese women’s 4x200 metres freestyle relay squad provided the other record feats.
Many, including Olympic champions Ian Thorpe, Pieter van den Hoogenband and Inge de Bruijn, stayed away, however, to focus on upcoming long-course events, such as the Commonwealth Games in Manchester, the European championships in Berlin and the Pan-Pacific championships in Yokohama.
FINA, swimming’s world governing body, recognises the problem and is working to produce a “logical world calendar for swimming”.
“It is true we don’t have probably one or two or three of the main stars but the competition is attractive,” FINA executive director Cornel Marculescu said, pointing to the championship record attendance in Moscow of some 600 swimmers from more than 90 national federations.
Igelstrom, facing all her major rivals, achieved world short-course records in the 50 and 100 metres breaststroke, becoming the first woman to break the 30-second barrier in the 50.
She also contributed to a third world mark in Sweden’s victorious women’s 4x100 metres medley relay and scooped a silver medal in the 200 breaststroke behind Chinese world record-holder Qi Hui.
PEIRSOL DOUBLE
Peirsol, world long-course champion and Olympic silver medallist, added the short-course 200 backstroke world mark to the long-course world record he set last month, and then swam the lead-off backstroke leg in the U.S. quartet which smashed Australia’s 4x100 metres medley relay world mark.
Australia topped the medals by 10 golds to eight, repeating their supremacy of last July’s world long-course championships in Fukuoka, Japan.
Australian Olympic 1500 freestyle champion Grant Hackett was ill on arrival in Moscow and had to pull out of the 200 metre freestyle, before earning gold medals in the 4x200 freestyle relay and 400 and 1500 freestyle.
Yana Klochkova of Ukraine, still only 19 years of age but already a double Olympic and double world long-course champion, completed a rare golden treble in the 200 and 400 individual medley and 400 freestyle.
Therese Alshammar, the most elegant of sprint stylists, retained her 50 and 100 freestyle titles in the absence of her Olympic nemesis De Bruijn. She also played a prominent part in Sweden’s 4x100 medley and 4x100 freestyle relay triumphs to bag the biggest personal haul of four golds.
Britain’s James Hickman gathered an unprecedented fourth successive world title in winning the men’s 200 metres butterfly, even if his path was eased by the absence of German world short-course record-holder Thomas Rupprath and top Americans Michael Phelps and Tom Malchow.
Britain and Germany sent small teams to Moscow, to focus on the Commonwealth Games and European championships which they respectively host and which this year collide.
POPOV ACCLAIMED
Swedish Olympic champion Lars Frolander, who won three gold medals, breaking world records at the last championships in 2000, suffered a wretched loss of form in Moscow and pulled out of his 100 freestyle title defence.
Alexander Popov, Australia-based but still Russian at heart, came to Moscow for his first serious foray into the world short-course championships and was rewarded with the enthusiastic and noisy acclaim of the home crowd.
Sadly the 30-year-old master could not add to his global titles, finishing with bronzes in the 4x100 freestyle relay and 50 metres freestyle, where he was beaten by Jose Meolans, the first Argentine to win a world swimming championship title.—Reuters