Thursday, March 19, 2009

Libby Trickett on her new straight-armed freestyle: "It feels very powerful and very strong"

Wendy from Of(f) the Deep End blog sent us this. Trickett speaks about her straight-arm technique and her second fastest 100-free time she set at the Australian National Championship yesterday. Here is a snippet from The Australian:

"...However, at the national championships in Sydney, Trickett was feeling no strain as she surged to the second-fastest time in history, 52.99sec, just 0.11sec short of her world record.

"I am pretty pleased, it's only 0.1 of a second off my best and only the second time I have officially gone under 53 seconds," Trickett said.

[Link]


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Watched the Men's 50m freestyle heats on TV earlier today. Quite a few of the swimmers are using straight arm recovery. Not sure if it's more than last year's Olympic Trials, but it seems like Sullivan's success is having an impact.

Anonymous said...

Also, a lot of the finalists are wearing Blue Seventy suits. Huge difference from last year's Olympic Trials where almost every single finalist wore a LZR. Also interesting to see in the heats of 50m freestyle that very few of the swimmers had new generation suits. Most wore older Speedo suits. A handful had Blue Seventy. Wasn't really until you got to the last three heats out of thirteen that you started to see new generation suits. I guess the price of a Blue Seventy suit isn't a big deal for a Masters swimmer, but maybe not so cheap for an eighteen year old uni student. This is about the Australian trials by the way.

Anonymous said...

I don't swim at a professional level, but it seems to me that straight arm recovery is well suited to sprint events.
Think about it, when you swing your arms forward with force, it has the effect of helping your other hand to push (propel) backwards. At the same time, it gives you the maximum stretch possible and you can immediately 'grab' the water.
I started swimming with straight arms after watching Otto and Evans in the late 80s. It is definitely more fun, if not faster.
t-brid