NASHVILLE, Dec. 15. AT the Music City Winter Invitational in Nashville, SwimAtlanta's 16-year-old Amanda Weir, fresh from her 100 free win at the U.S. Open last week, had a solid weekend, winning three events — the 50-100-200 yard frees — and taking third in the 100 fly.<\/p>\n
Her times were 22.90, 48.96, 1:47.72 (pr) and 55.84.<\/p>\n
She holds the 15-16 NAG records in the 50-100 frees (22.45\/48.86), both from last spring's American Short Course Championships in Texas. She turns 17 in mid-Mach and will have one last crack at bettering her marks in three months during this same meet at Texas' Jamail Swim Center, site of this year's NCAA Division 1 men's championship a few weeks later.<\/p>\n
Interestingly, Weir's 50 free pr is .01 slower than the 13-14 NAG record of 22.44 by former Tandem Swim Club star Dara Torres, who did that time exactly 20 and-a-half years ago at the spring Nationals in Gainesville.<\/p>\n
Whom did Torres beat there after withstanding several false starts? None other than current University of Texas woman's coach Jill Sterkel, then a swimmer at Texas, who until then had never lost a 50 race in her career.<\/p>\n
Torres of course went on to a stellar career at Florida, retired after the Barcelona Olympics, then came back for one last shot at a Big O's individual gold and made the plane to Sydney at 32. She still holds the American-record in the 50 meter free and 50 and 100 meter butterfly, and tied with teammate Jenny Thompson for the bronze at Sydney.<\/p>\n
She's permanently retired now but Stanford grad Thompson came back after a two-year hiatus last summer — scored at Nationals in Ft. Lauderdale — and now may defer her medical school studies at Columbia until after Athens.<\/p>\n
— Bill Bell<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
NASHVILLE, Dec. 15. AT the Music City Winter Invitational in Nashville, SwimAtlanta's 16-year-old Amanda Weir, fresh from her 100 free win at the U.S. Open last week, had a solid<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"dois","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-zzzzzzzzz"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\r\n