American ace Natalie Coughlin gets back into race action next month after a long post Beijing 2008 lay off. She will compete at the USA Swimming Grand Prix at Austin, Texas. along with 39 other members of the USA national team, on March 4-6.
During her absence, Coughlin, the first woman to break the minute over 100m backstroke and Olympic champion in 2004 and 2008, slipped to fifth place on the all-time world rankings almost a second behind the world record set by Brit Gemma Spofforth in Rome. That standard is 58.12, set in the same LZR Racer that Coughlin wore on her way to the Olympic crown in 2008. Spofforth has been busy proving herself in textile in recent weeks, clocking some encouraging yards times this past week.
The fastest textile-suit time ever over 100m is the 59.44 at which Coughlin held the world mark on the eve of the shiny suits era. The new era is underway, but for Coughlin, a proven force with a superb angle of buoyancy honed over a long period of time through her work coach Teri McKeever and the likes of swim whisperer Milt Nelms, it may well feel like business as usual.
Coughlin had enjoyed a sizeable lead on the world in sprint backstroke events between 2002, when she first broke the minute and 2007, when she set the world record of 59.44 to claim the world title in a final in which only she and Laure Manaudou broke the minute. At the time, they were the only two women ever to have cracked the minute. By the end of the Rome 2009 world championships, the number stood at 20, in part courtesy of performance-enhancing suits that have been banned since January 1 this year.
The first entry on the all-time list from a time before the arrival of non-textile suits that changed the nature of the sport for two years, is the dubious 1:00.16 of He Cihong (CHN) from Rome 1994. Within weeks of that world championship, at which the performances of Chinese swimmers rained like bullets on the world of swimming, seven members of the China team had tested positive for steroids.
In Austin next week, Olympic champions Aaron Peirsol, Rebecca Soni are joined by a host of world-class acts, including Garret Weber-Gale, David Walters, Matt Grevers, Cullen Jones, Peter Vanderkaay, Mark Gangloff, Kathleen Hersey, Margaret Hoelzer, Dana Vollmer, Kara Lynn Joyce and Amanda Weir. Some great races in store.
