I've brought this up with the Swedish Swimming association after I found out Sweden was going to host the 2010 worlds.
Sweden has a fairly small Masters program. At our Nationals we had roughly 1370 starts for 30 events (including 6 relays). The event with the most starts was mens 50m free at 175, least starts womens 800m, only 8. An average of 45 starts per event.
Right now, my team is only has 4 competing masters swimmers and one of them refuses to swim anything but breastroke at meets, so no free relay for the rest of us.
If you really want a free relay, you could just let your breaststroker swim breaststroke (remember, there's no restriction on what freestyle can be during a freestyle event; see FINA SW 5.1). The relay time will take a hit on that basis, but I'd say that's better than no relay.
On the other hand, doing that once with your teammate might convince them to at least try some crawl action during freestyle.
In other news, Friday's first two heat sheets were posted (Women's 800 Free, 35 heats in the 10 lane pool; Men's 800 Free, 42 heats in the 8 lane pool). It's interesting they decided to seed by age group and not just by time (that's how they did it in Stanford, but then again, they had 46 heats of men and 46 heats of women in 10 lane pools!).
Patrick King
I've brought this up with the Swedish Swimming association after I found out Sweden was going to host the 2010 worlds.
Sweden has a fairly small Masters program. At our Nationals we had roughly 1370 starts for 30 events (including 6 relays). The event with the most starts was mens 50m free at 175, least starts womens 800m, only 8. An average of 45 starts per event.
Right now, my team is only has 4 competing masters swimmers and one of them refuses to swim anything but breastroke at meets, so no free relay for the rest of us.
If you really want a free relay, you could just let your breaststroker swim breaststroke (remember, there's no restriction on what freestyle can be during a freestyle event; see FINA SW 5.1). The relay time will take a hit on that basis, but I'd say that's better than no relay.
On the other hand, doing that once with your teammate might convince them to at least try some crawl action during freestyle.
In other news, Friday's first two heat sheets were posted (Women's 800 Free, 35 heats in the 10 lane pool; Men's 800 Free, 42 heats in the 8 lane pool). It's interesting they decided to seed by age group and not just by time (that's how they did it in Stanford, but then again, they had 46 heats of men and 46 heats of women in 10 lane pools!).
Patrick King
