Swimming: Shanahan sets junior 200m record

Otumoetai's Daniel Shanahan is the fastest 12-year-old over 200m freestyle in New Zealand swimming history. Photo / Andrew Warner

Tauranga has another national freestyle record-holder to follow in Nathan Capp's wake.

Daniel Shanahan, 12, from the Otumoetai Swim Club, shaved an impressive half-second off the New Zealand 12-and-under 200m short course freestyle record at the annual Tri-Series event in Napier last week.

"It feels a lot better being New Zealand record-holder than Bay of Plenty and a lot bigger," Daniel said. "Half a second is quite a bit. I thought I would have done about a second or two seconds slower so I was quite surprised at that."

But that was not the only record Daniel broke in a landmark week in the young swimmer's career.

Twice he smashed his own Bay of Plenty time for 200m freestyle and then wiped nationally-ranked Kane Radford's name off the Bay of Plenty 400m freestyle record in his age group. Daniel also set seven personal best times over three days.

He was the youngest of the Central Aquaknights team of 48 swimmers aged under 16 from Bay of Plenty, Waikato, Taranaki and Hawke's Bay/Poverty Bay.

"Kane's one was there for about 13 years, I think. It feels pretty good as he is on a lot of the record sheets so one less for him now," Daniel said. "I have met him in some of the open water swims and raced with him, or tried to at least.

"I have been picking up my training a bit after the last month or so but it hasn't been overly hard. I train 12 hours a week in the pool but have dropped off my surf lifesaving training a bit as I can't manage everything."

Overseeing Daniel's training programme is Otumoetai head coach Mike Lee.

"He is the fastest 12-year-old ever in New Zealand but he is only 12. We are doing quite a bit of technical adjustments with his strokes and his skills and I am damn sure he is going to get faster as he gets older and hopefully bigger," Lee said.

"At present he is on a fairly limited work load so that as he does age we can up the amount of training that he does and he should be able to cope with it as he matures. Hopefully we end up with someone representing New Zealand on a frequent basis."

Daniel, who has just finished at Otumoetai Intermediate and is off to Tauranga Boys' College next year, has set lofty goals for the future.

"I want to swim at international level at world champs and Commonwealth Games, possibly further. I would like to go to the Olympics. It would be a great achievement but there is a lot of hard work before that."