Ellen Gandy and Jemma Lowe booked their tickets to the World Championships in Shanghai in July after taking top honours in the 200 metres butterfly in Manchester last night to lead the world rankings.
The battle between the Great Britain pair ended in Gandy’s favour as she took 2min 6.13sec to Lowe’s 2:06.94 and both provided assurance that they can learn from their mistakes.
Gandy, 19 and based in Melbourne, had arrived at the World Championships in Rome in 2009 as the fastest in the world that year but came fifteenth in 2:08.55.
The events of Rome have shaped her ambitions for Shanghai this summer, she said. Asked to define her target for this year, Gandy said: “To control my nerves on the international stage. I wasn’t ready to be ranked first in the world in Rome but I’ve matured a lot since then and that will be reflected in how I’ll swim in Shanghai.”
Lowe also knows she must improve. In great form at the Beijing Olympics, she was one of only three swimmers to turn inside one minute at the halfway mark in the semi-finals but the pace of the fastest two women in history ahead of her was too much and she faded badly and missed the final by 0.14sec.
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In the men’s 200 metres medley James Goddard beat Joe Roebuck by 0.06 sec in a time of 1 min 58.22sec. He then returned to the water for the semi-final of another medal-potential event in Shanghai this summer, the 200 metres backstroke.
Goddard and Sean Kelly, his coach, have studied film of him competing against Ryan Lochte, the American Olympic champion.
They learnt that the British champion travelled just as fast in the water but at starts and turns he lost up to a second and sometimes more. “It’s something we’ve been working really hard on,” he said. “The Americans are killing us on the turns and by next year we have to be as good as them.”