budapest: our pick of the brits
It was a great week to be British in Budapest, with a record medal haul and a top team trophy to savour. We pick a few of our highlights from the British performance.
No need to look too far in this category, with one swimmer standing head and shoulders above the rest, those shoulders being adorned with two gold and a silver medal. Edinburgh’s Kirsty Balfour built on a great Commonwealth games to produce an excellent European championships taking a convincing victory by a huge margin over 200m and only just missing out in the shorter event, before unleashing a masterclass in the medley relay. While she may have swum faster in Melbourne, it’s an entirely different matter chasing the world record holder, with whom her stroke bears comparison, to competing when you are an overwhelming favourite. The Scot showed great poise under pressure to duly take out the 200m title.
No question. Not even a second thought required here; the performance of the women’s 4x100m relay team was sensational and had everything with the team displaying great depth of character not to be overawed given the circumstances. A less than perfect start from Mel Marshall, which saw her entangled in the lane rope, was quickly rendered irrelevant as Kirsty Balfour produced the 5th fastest relay split ever with a 1:06.33, the sixth best ever, to move the team through to the head of the pack. For Terri Dunning, standing on the blocks, the pressure must have been immense at that point, particularly given her disappointing showing in the 200m fly a day earlier.
But the Birmingham swimmer showed admirable grit and determination, producing a fast split and most importantly giving anchorwoman Fran Halsall clear water ahead of the Germans. With Britte Steffen producing a split that only she herself has bettered it was down to the young Liverpudlian to hold on grimly in the last few meters, but hold on she did and the rest is history.
It would be easy to go with Balfour or the medley relay but for us there were others who stood out, often for entirely different reasons. The silver medal of Jo Jackson in the 400m was impressive given her recent injury trials, as was Simon Burnett’s anchor leg of the men’s medley relay, the fastest in the field and enough to snatch a bronze medal, in the context of his indifferent form earlier in the week.
But for us the best swim came from Rebecca Adlington, a young lady who put disappointment at not qualifying for Melbourne well and truly behind her and improved her personal best over 800m to take a surprising silver, headed only by Laure Manaudou’s European record, and to mark herself firmly as Britain’s number one.