The best teenagers of the Mare Nostrum Swim Tour 2024

Lina Portman3 weeks ago

1 5 minutes read

There are just over six weeks until the world's best swimmers descend on the French capital and, alongside the big names fine-tuning their preparations throughout the three stages of the Mare Nostrum Tour, some talented teenagers were also emerging as swimmers potential to monitor. Paris 2024.

When Tomoyuki Matsushita touched the wall at the end of the 400m individual medley during the third and final Monaco leg of the Mare Nostrum Tour, it completed a clean slate of victories in the Mediterranean for the Japanese teenager. Having swept the pool by more than five seconds at Canet-en-Roussiillon and two seconds at Barcelona, Matsushita finished third at the halfway mark in Monaco before overtaking the competition to finish third of three.

It was a remarkable journey for the teenage Matsushita. Last March, he earned his first senior international berth by winning the 400m individual medley title at the Japanese Olympic Trials, securing his place on the team for Paris 2024. The 18-year-old is a rising star of Japanese swimming, but despite this he entered the Olympic trials behind faster seeds Tomoru Honda and Daiya Seto. Matsushita also needed a career-best time to meet the strict qualifying standards set by the Japan Swimming Federation, a challenge he was determined to meet.

The door opened slightly when Honda misjudged his preliminary swim and missed the final, with Matsushita then producing the swim of his life to pass Daiya Seto on the final lap of the race to record a lifetime best of 4: 10.04. Matsushita was more than two seconds behind Seto at the end of the backstroke leg, and still 1.69 seconds behind when transitioning to the freestyle, but the teenager came home in 56.71, putting a close of one second between him and Seto at touch, with the veteran missing out on qualifying. standard.

Matsushita is clearly a big event swimmer who thrives in the final two laps of his main event. At his last major international competition, the Junior World Swimming Championships in September 2023, the story was similar. In Netanya, Matsushita beat teammate and defending champion Riku Yamaguchi in a race that changed leaders four times over the first four walls. Yamaguchi broke away in the breaststroke heat to lead the field through the 250m and 300m turns before Matsushita overtook the defending champion in the final two laps to win his first junior world title with a new world record championship of 4:10.97.

Matsushita did not swim at Doha 2024 – although his time at the Japanese Olympic trials would have challenged New Zealand's Lewis Clareburt in the race for gold. That time, however, will still need to be considerably faster to challenge Paris' best, but if one thing is certain, expect the Japanese teenager to fight to the end, regardless of where he ranks on the table. the final wall.

While Siobhan Haughey continued her dominance at the 200m freestyle world championships at the recent Mare Nostrum Tour, a few Hungarian teenagers took on the challenge of the Doha 2024 champion in the Mediterranean-based series. One of those teenagers was 18-year-old Nikolett Padar, who used the famous swimming series as another opportunity to race against some of the world's best talent as she prepares for her Olympic Games debut.

Padar is no stranger to high-level competition and actually swam at the Budapest leg of the 2018 Aquatic Swimming World Cup as a twelve-year-old invitational club swimmer. Padar may have been twenty seconds behind winner Sarah Sjostrom at that point, but there's no doubt that the experience of lining up against some of the best swimmers in the world lit a spark that would help raise a already exceptional junior swimmer.

At the age of fifteen, Padar was already European junior champion in the 200m freestyle and in the same year she made her senior international debut for Hungary at the World Aquatic Swimming Championships (25m) in Abu Dhabi 2021. An open national title followed in 2022, as well as an individual swim and three relays at Budapest 2022, and five gold medals at the Junior World Swimming Championships at Lima 2022.

When Padar recently lined up against reigning world champion Haughey at the Canet-en-Roussillon leg of the Mare Nostrum Tour, the Hungarian teenager had already competed in three World Aquatics Championships under her belt, and when Paris 2024 will take place, she will definitely be a swimmer who is unlikely to be intimidated by competing against the world's best at the highest possible level.

Plenty of local talent was on display across the three stops of the Mare Nostrum Tour, with French teenager Mary-Ambre Moluh once again demonstrating why she is regularly talked about as part of the next generation of elite women's backstrokers. Moluh has broken junior and senior records over the past two years, and at the Canet-en-Roussillon leg of the series she looked once again on track to start at her first Olympic Games.

At the start of the calendar year, the 18-year-old set the fastest time of her career in the 100m backstroke at the Euro Meet in Luxembourg, with a time of 59.67 which put her under the standard qualification for Paris. An extended training period in Tenerife, Spain, was followed by another time of sub-59.91 minutes at a national competition in Lyon, France, before the teenager honed her running skills alongside a world-class peloton on the Mediterranean, including Ingrid Wilm, Kira Toussaint. , and French national record holder Pauline Mahieu.

As the French Swimming Federation holds a “selection trial competition” for the Paris 2024 team, the battle between Mahieu, 25-year-old Molu and the minute qualifying standard will undoubtedly be one races to follow in Chartres over the course of a week. A former Youth Olympic Games athlete in 2014, Mahieu had to wait until the age of 24 before making her debut at the World Aquatics Championships. At Fukuoka 2023, she set the French national record in the semi-final, placed sixth in the final and has since hovered around the minute mark in the 100m backstroke.

With Moluh now just a third of a second off Mahieu's national record and just 0.17 off French icon Laure Manadou's record, expect a fierce battle in Chartres as both swimmers seek a place in the team for a rare home Olympics.

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