Seoul qualifying times tough for hopeful swimmers

Press, 20 November 1987, Page 26

Seoul qualifying times tough for hopeful swimmers

Any swimmer who achieves a qualifying time set by the New Zealand swimming selectors for the Seoul Olympics next year, will have earned his place in the New Zealand team. The selectors, established tough but realistic times for New Zealand competitors, times that will ensure swimmers will perform with credit in Seoul. Linda Robinson, Canterbury’s most accomplished swimmer at present, and the province’s best hope for inclusion in the Seoul swimming team, will be delighted if she can qualify for the Olympics, but she too is realistic, and realises she has a considerable improvement to make to earn a place in the team. Robinson, who was 16 in August, and the winner of six titles at the New Zealand championships in Christchurch in March, has wisely not set her heart on qualifying for the Olympics.

It is not that she and 1 her coach at the Wharanui Club, Rainer Goltzsche, consider the. qualifying times entirely beyond her young grasp, but that they are more

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concerned with long term targets.

Robinson’s best event is the gruelling 400 m medley, and it is in that race that she stands the best chance of earning a place in the Olympic team. Her best time for the event, recorded at the Pan Pacific championships in Brisbane last March, is smin Is. To qualify for the Olympics she will need to improve that time by six seconds. Robinson and Mr Goltzsche however, want to avoid getting caught up in the vortex that grips swimmers in Olympic and Commonwealth Games years as they make frantic efforts to reach the qualifying times. Unfortunately, often the harder swimmers try to reach the qualifying times, the more elusive they become.

Robinson has decided the Olympics qualifying time will not rule her season. Instead she is approaching the summer with the intention of improving her times at

KEVIN TUTTY

every opportunity. If the 400 m individual medley qualifying time of 4min 55.82 s is achieved, then she will consider that a bonus.

Mr Goltzsche said he has seen too many swimmers set themselves qualifying targets and fail to achieve them because they place too much pressure on themselves.

The long term aims of Robinson are the Commonwealth Games in Auckland in 1990. In two

years she will be a stronger and more experienced racer, and the 400 m medley qualifying time, and perhaps those of two or three other events, should be well within her grasp. Robinson considers the 400 m medley her best event, but she is no slouch at middle and long distance freestyle, and the 200 m butterfly. During the winter season she joined an elite band of New Zealand woman swimmers when she won an 800 m freestyle race at a carnival in Tauranga. Robinson recorded Bmin 56.75 s and became only the fourth New Zealand woman to break 9min for the distance. The others have been Jaynie Parkhouse, Alison Calder and Rebecca Perrott.

The opportunities for high level competition are limited in New Zealand, so this summer Robinson wil travel to Queensland in January for the state championships. There is also the prospect of her being chosen for a world class series of three carnivals that will be held in Adelaide, Melbourne and Canberra in January.

A New Zealand team of six has been invited to attend the series which

will include a squad of 25 of the top swimmers from Europe, the best Austra- * Ilans, and a group of Americans.

Eighteen months ago Robinson went through a lean period when her swimming reacted a plateau. Improvements in personal best times were few and far between. ' "I was not too worried about that It happens to most swimmers at some stage of their careers. I kept on training and knew that times would come eventually.” When the Improvements came, they arrived in a deluge. In 18 months she reduced her 400 m medley time by 17s to smin I.os and there have been comparable reductions in other events.

If, in the next five months, Robinson’s improvement continues at the same rate it has in the last year, by the time the New Zealand championships are swum in Dunedin in March, she could well have secured a place in the New Zealand Olympic team.