Veteran Calvyn Justus completed a comeback from a debilitating back injury in superb style at the national championships on Friday, as he posted the fastest 50m freestyle heat time that also qualified him for the Commonwealth Games.
The 30-year-old Los Angeles resident, a member of the 2016 Rio Olympic Games team, clocked 21.97sec to hand defending champion Pieter Coetzé his first second-seed status of the gala, in Gqeberha.
They race the final on Friday evening.
Justus delivered one of six qualifying swims in sprint events on Friday morning, with Coetzé notching up his fourth of the competition and Caitlin de Lange (women’s 50m freestyle), Lara van Niekerk (women’s 50m breaststroke), Michael Houlie and Chris Smith (both men’s 50m breaststroke) lifting the total number of qualifiers to 12.
Justus, who hadn’t attended a South African championship for nearly a decade, found his way back to swimming after suffering a back injury that left him unable to walk between 2022 and 2023.
“I herniated three discs, which pinched my sciatic nerve. I couldn’t walk for a year,” said Justus, who has been living in Los Angeles for six years.
“I lost like 20kg. One of the lowest points of my life, but when I healed from that I had a lot of motivation to get stronger and use my body as much as I could.”
The fashion designer, who works for himself and a new brand called INTRA, returned to the pool in his bid to regain his fitness. “Got back in the water pretty quickly and fell in love again.”
And with Los Angeles hosting the next Olympics in 2028, he decided to try to get to a home Games. “I thought, ‘Oh, that would be really fun’.”
Justus, who returned to competitive swimming less than a year ago, started his international career in 2013, focusing on distance races, mainly the 200m and 400m freestyle.
When he won the South African 100m freestyle title at the 2016 Olympic trials, he insisted at the time it was a fluke.
Now Justus is flying in the 50m.
He clocked 22.03 at a meet in the US last month and now ranks as the fifth fastest South African of all time behind Roland Schoeman (21.67), Brad Tandy (21.70), Graeme Moore (21.72) and Gideon Louw (21.92).
Just behind him is Coetzé, with the 22.04 he swam in the morning, one-hundredth of a second inside the entry standard.
One of the first swimmers to congratulate Justus on his swim was star veteran Chad Le Clos, a teammate from 2014 to 2018 who is still looking to secure qualification for Scotland.
Justus has three Commonwealth Games relay medals, two of them from Glasgow 2014, where, competing only in the heats of the 4x100m and 4x200m freestyle relays, he didn’t get to stand on the podium and instead received his gongs in a side room at the venue.
But he was on the rostrum to be handed his 4x100m medley relay bronze at Gold Coast 2018 after swimming the backstroke leg in the final.
Other qualifiers
De Lange went 24.77 in the women’s 50m freestyle, comfortably inside the 24.86 criterion.
Van Niekerk, the double Commonwealth Games champion in 2022, touched in 30.52 while Smith and Houlie completed their races in 26.73 and 26.83 respectively.
Kris Mihaylov was fastest in the men’s 200m butterfly in 2min 02.31sec, although he’ll need to get close to his personal best to beat the 1:56.51 qualifying mark in the evening. Anje van As was fastest in the women’s 200m butterfly in 2:17.84.
TimesLIVE
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