By John Lohn<\/p>\n
MONTREAL, Canada, July 27. A rematch of the Olympic final in Athens is on the docket, as the United States\u2019 Ryan Lochte and Michael Phelps qualified first and second for the championship heat of the 200 individual medley on Wednesday night. In qualifying first, Lochte, the silver medalist in Athens, posted the 10th-fastest time in history, a mark of 1:58.06.<\/p>\n
Phelps, who contested the 100 free semifinals earlier in the night, breezed to a swim of 1:58.36. The Olympic champ and owner of the nine fastest times ever produced, Phelps will be the heavy favorite to capture gold on. Phelps\u2019 world-record time is 1:55.94 and he\u2019s been under 1:57 on four occasions.<\/p>\n
Lithuania\u2019s Vytautas Janusaitis also cracked the two-minute barrier, swimming 1:59.72 for the third seed in the final. Janusaitis finished ahead of Hungary\u2019s Laszlo Cseh, who touched in 2:00.12. Cseh was faster during the morning preliminaries, as he went 1:59.56 during that session. Cseh should have enough juice to pick up the bronze medal.<\/p>\n
The fifth berth to the championship race went to Japan\u2019s Hidemasa Sano, thanks to a performance of 2:00.45. The other qualifiers for the final were Italy\u2019s Alessio Boggiatto (2:00.52), Russia\u2019s Igor Berezutsky (2:01.11) and New Zealand\u2019s Dean Kent (2:01.55). Australia\u2019s Adam Lucas just missed the final, as he went 2:01.99.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By John Lohn MONTREAL, Canada, July 27. A rematch of the Olympic final in Athens is on the docket, as the United States\u2019 Ryan Lochte and Michael Phelps qualified first<\/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":[10,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world","category-zzzzzzzzz"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\r\n