Chad Le Clos fires stern warning to his 200m butterfly rivals

Chad Le Clos fired a warning to his 200m butterfly rivals in Durban on Thursday night, showing he was back after his 2016 Olympic disaster in that race.

Le Clos burned his nearest competitors by nearly five seconds as he steamed to victory at the national championships in 1min 55.00sec, the fastest time in the world so far.

The 2012 Olympic champion in this event ended only fourth at last year's Rio Games, a painful pill despite winning silver medals in two other events.

Last night’s was his second-best time in the King’s Park pool, but unlike his quickest effort in 2014, he wasn’t shaved.

“I think it was a lot smoother than recent 200m fly [races], it didn’t kill me as much as I thought it would,” said Le Clos, who has been working with Italian coach Andrea Di Nino since early this year.

“I was hurting coming into the [last] 50m [but] I still felt I wasn’t dying from 75m to go whereas in Stellenbosch [in late February] I didn’t know if I was going to finish that last length.”

He’s confident that by the world championships in Budapest in July, he will be stronger in the final 50m of the race, where he failed to deliver his trademark kick at the Rio Games.

“I’m not going to get carried away with this [time],” said Le Clos, who won the 200m freestyle earlier in the week and will race the 100m butterfly today and tomorrow.

“I’m coming into Budapest as an underdog in all three events. I’m looking to come out victorious.”

His competitors will include home-ground favourites, reigning world champion Laszlo Cseh and Olympic bronze medallist Tamas Kenderesi.

Le Clos said the technical changes he had made to his stroke and turns were paying dividends, adding he was chuffed with the time.

“If you told me before the race 1:55-low I definitely would have taken it.”

Le Clos scratched from the blue riband 100m freestyle, where young Zane Waddell stole centre stage, upstaging a pair of Olympians as he delivered two personal bests yesterday to take pole position for the final tonight.

The 19-year-old management information systems student at the University of Alabama was the third-quickest in the morning heats when he went 49.99sec, his first occasion under 50 seconds, with Dough Erasmus going 49.85 and Brad Tandy 49.90.

Tandy scratched from the semifinals to focus on the 50m breaststroke final later in the evening, but he would have been hard-pressed to overhaul this Bloemfontein boytjie on the night.

Waddell dominated the first semifinal to win in 49.55, while Erasmus won the next one in a slower 50.26, still the second-fastest time of the night.

Waddell — coached in the US by former South African Jonty Skinner, who held the 50m and 100m freestyle world records in the 1970s — insisted he wouldn’t get fazed in the final.

“We’ve learned … to always trust the process that we’ve gone through.

“We worked hard up to this point, I’m just going to go into this race, race tough and be the quickest I can be,” added Waddell, winner of five gold medals at the 2015 Youth Commonwealth Games.

He will renew hostilities with Tandy, 25, and Erasmus, 26, in the 50m freestyle, the event in which the two seniors represented SA at the Rio Games. Tandy finished tied sixth in Brazil.

Rebecca Meder, the 14-year-old Cape Town schoolgirl, won the women's 200m freestyle for her third title of the gala, and she is aiming for two more in the next two days.

Cameron van der Burgh ended his nationals campaign winning the 50m breaststroke in 27.17, ahead of Tandy in 28.16. - TMG Digital