Manchester hosted the 9th FINA World Short Course Swimming Championships last week. I was lucky enough to attend the Opening and Closing Ceremonies and had a brilliant time.
The pool was a temporary one, built at the Manchester Evening News Arena. This was an inspired idea and looked amazing. It didn't feel like your ordinary swim meet - everything was black and there were lots of 'rock concert' touches like the competitors coming out from centre stage with a spotlight on them. It also felt very Mancunian - the races started to the tune of Blue Monday and the medal ceremonies had an instrumental of Bittersweet Symphony playing in the background.
There was some excellent swimming with a total of 18 world records being broken, which was a record in itself. The swimmer of the meet was definitely Ryan Lochte (pictured below) - this guy is super quick and at all the strokes. He won 4 gold medals and broke world records all of them.
The British team did quite well, which makes a nice change. There were some good times being posted and on three separate occasions they managed to break the old world record, but came second. I'd like to see the British swimmers becoming better at racing - making sure that they win, rather than worrying about the time.
It was great to see Mark Foster still competing at the highest level after all these years. He didn't quite make it in the50m freestyle, but Duje Draganja from Croatia proved a worth opponent by winning in a super quick world record time.
Many of the fastest times came from people swimming in the outside lanes. The swimmers said this was because there were less waves in these lanes, so maybe it is time to allow the fastest qualifiers to choose their lanes in future?
Manchester did a fantastic job of hosting this event. Let's hope there are more events like it in the future.
