We cover it all. It seems the past weeks were a never ending swim meet. Actually it was three competitions with the best swimmers in the world in action.
Records first tumbled in Australia with Grant Hackett bettering the 200 freestyle long course world mark.
Eight short course world records followed in Hong Kong at the fourth Short Course World Championships.
At the same time, The U.S. Spring Nationals took place and Lenny Krayzelburg closed in on the 200 backstroke world record.
We had day-by-day coverage on our web site at www.swimnews.com from all these competitions. So what's in this issue could be history to some. But it's all been polished, edited, and presented in a concise and attractive layout suitable for future reference.
We thank our contributors: Paul Quinlan, who covered Australia; and Nikki Dryden, who covered the U.S. Nationals. I travelled to Hong Kong and provided the media there with daily extended start lists (information on the finalists in each event), as well as wrote daily summaries and sent back the results. Our web site was never this busy as we were one of the main sources for all these competitions.
Special thanks to Patrick Kramer, who took all the pictures in Hong Kong, and Marco Chiesa, who drove to Long Island to cover the U.S. Nationals, while maintaining our web site.
Anita Lonsbrough wrote some of the personality profiles in Hong Kong.
I was able to complete work on Canadian short course TAG times. But results arrived as late as April 21, so if you were wonder why we're so late, that's one explanation. We think all major competitions are included and certainly everything that was sent. However there are missing results from meets that were never sent. It's too bad and we ask for your understanding about any missing times.
We can't rank them if we don't have them.