NANTERRE, FRANCE – JULY 31: Kate Douglass of Team United States competes in the Women’s 200m … [+]
During the first of her two swims on the first night of the Incheon, South Korea stop on the World Aquatics Swimming World Cup, Kate Douglass swam 2:14.16 in the 200-meter breaststroke, breaking the short-course meters world record.
Fellow American and Olympic champion Rebecca Soni held the former world record of 2:14.57, which stood for almost 15 years.
The 22-year-old Douglass has racked up many accolades over her career. She’s a highly versatile swimmer, capable of swimming anything from the 50-meter freestyle to the 200-meter breaststroke. This versatility has helped her earn five Olympic medals in two appearances. She claimed her first individual gold in the 200-meter breaststroke at the Paris Olympics. She’s a world champion in the long-course and short-course meter pools across multiple events and is one of the best college swimmers in history with 15 NCAA titles.
But until today, she had yet to set an individual world record.
“I definitely wasn’t expecting that,” said Douglass after the race. “That was a very old record, and I honestly wasn’t sure if I was ever going to get it.”
Not only was it an old record, but it was a record from the super-suit era in swimming when athletes were allowed to wear full-body polyurethane suits that improved buoyancy. When the suits were banned on January 1, 2010, many in the swimming community worried there would never be another world record broken.
The super-suit records took on a legendary shine; it was a huge moment at the 2011 World Championships when Ryan Lochte broke the first long-course world record since the suits were banned. Since then, the majority of the super-suited world records have been broken. But there are still a handful left on the record books, and the legend of those records only grows the longer they stand.
So, it adds another layer of significance to Douglass’ mark that she not only surpassed one but did so by .41 seconds—a sizable amount of time in swimming. And not only did she break the record, but she did so at an in-season competition, rather than at a championship meet, like the upcoming Short Course World Championships in December.
Douglass trains at the University of Virginia. She is the second Virginia-based swimmer to break a short-course meters world record in the past week. On Oct. 18, Gretchen Walsh shattered the 100-meter individual medley world record with a 55.98, surpassing the American record Douglass had set hours earlier in Shanghai, China at the first stop of the Swimming World Cup.
At the Swimming World Cup, swimmers earn points based on their placement and time in their three best events. The man and woman with the most points at the end of each of the three stops win prize money, as do the man and woman who score the most points across the three stops. Douglass won the women’s rankings at the first meet of the series in Shanghai. She currently leads through one day in Incheon and remains undefeated after six total races at the World Cup.
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