Olympics: Schooling warms up for title defence with 100m freestyle swim

Jul 27, 2021 07:52 pm

Singapore’s star swimmer Joseph Schooling warmed up for his Olympic 100m butterfly title defence with a 49.84sec effort in the 100m freestyle heats at the Tokyo Aquatic Centre on Tuesday (July 27).

Swimming in lane five, the 26-year-old’s effort saw him finish sixth out of eight swimmers in Heat 5, which was won by Croatia’s Nikola Miljenic in 49.25sec.

Schooling, who had set the national 100m free record of 48.27 at the Rio Olympics in 2016, finished 39th out of 70 swimmers overall on Tuesday and did not advance to the semi-finals.

"Definitely a little nervous for the first one," he said after the race. "It's always good to get the first one out of the bag. I felt all right. The meet will definitely get better as we go through. The first one is always tough, but overall we got the meet started.

"(The timing was) not very good, especially the last 15m, I think the legs kind of gave out. But like I said, it's the first one and I've been training fly the whole year, so this one was kind of a get up and see where we are."

Schooling’s main event takes place later in the week. The heats of the 100m fly are on Thursday morning.

He won the 100m fly in 50.39sec at Rio 2016 to become the Republic’s only Olympic gold medallist.

But rivals such as the United States’ Caeleb Dressel and Poland’s Kristof Milak have edged ahead of him recently.

Schooling’s best time in the 100m fly this year is 52.93sec, while Dressel has gone under 50 seconds.