57th TOKYO SWIMMING CENTER OUTSTANDING ATHLETES INVITATIONAL
The penultimate night of racing at the 57th Tokyo Swimming Center Outstanding Athletes Invitational saw newly minted 200m breaststroke World Record holder Shin Ohashi dive in for his signature event.
The 17-year-old beat the field by a healthy margin, registering a time of 2:08.79 to get to the wall in the only time of the field under the 2:11 barrier.
Runner-up status went to Oiwa Maumiwa who touched in 2:11.86, with two men, Ryu Saito and Haruki Kabira, touching simultaneously in 2:14.01 to share the bronze medal.
As for Ohashi, whose historic WR of 2:04.83 was set en route to winning gold at this year’s Asian Games, the teen says he was testing out a strategy to have more speed on the back half.
Ohashi nearly evenly split tonight’s race, with a mark of 1:04.25 on the first 100m and 1:04.54 on the way home, with the latter checking in .4 seconds faster than his Asian Games split.
Ohashi said post-race, “To improve on my personal best time (which is a new world record), I wanted to increase my speed in the second half. First, I wanted to get a feel for it.”
He said he gained valuable experience as he aims to break the world record again. (Daily Japan)
The other highlight of the evening came in the men’s 200m free, with World Championships medalist Tatsuya Murasa clocking a winning effort of 1:45.01 to set himself apart from his competitors by over three seconds.
Teammate Issa Kuroda cleaned up the silver medal in 1:48.25, with Australian Bill Atkinson rounding out the podium in 1:48.32.
19-year-old Murasa is the reigning Japanese national champion, having won gold last month at the country’s short course championships. He posted a time of 1:41.89 as a new lifetime best, becoming Japan’s #2 performer in history. Only Katsuhiro Matsumoto has been faster, owning the national standard at 1:41.29 from the 2022 World Championships.
