Swimming: Competitors vying for Games places

By PETER JESSUP

Swimming New Zealand hopes as many as 15 competitors will qualify for the Manchester Commonwealth Games, with the bulk of those coming through next week's nationals in Auckland.

Already four have bettered the qualification times - Dean Kent in the 200m and 400m individual medley, Toni Jeffs in the women's 50m freestyle and Cameron Gibson and Melissa Ingram in the 200m backstroke.

The meeting that starts at the Waitakere Aquatic Centre on Tuesday could be dubbed the "battle of the ages".

At one end there is 33-year-old Jeffs, who is ready for her fourth Games - the first in the same Henderson pool - and 30-year-old Jon Winter, who will attempt a comeback, because for the first time the Games include his preferred 50m butterfly and backstroke.

In the mid-20s are their fellow Atlanta Olympians Alison Fitch and Sarah Jackson from Canterbury.

Fitch has moved from Hamilton to join a strong contingent of Games contenders under coach Jan Cameron at the North Shore swim club and Millennium Institute. With Jeffs she will spark-up the freestyle sprints. Jackson is in a very competitive field in backstroke, with Ingram and North Shore team-mate Hannah McLean, and Sydney Olympians Liz van Welie, Helen Norfolk and Monique Robins.

Also shifted north, leaving Duncan Laing in Otago for Cameron, is Jonathan Duncan.

Cameron has switched him from freestyle middle-distance to butterfly and backstroke. Her son, Scott Talbot-Cameron, back from a US scholarship, and Anthony van der Kraay, also at North Shore, will ensure a good contest in the backstroke.

A maximum three competitors from any one country will be accepted for Manchester, according to ranking.

The only real Games hope not competing over the week is sprinter Vivienne Rignall, who is looking to qualify at the German nationals in May.

The qualification period finishes on May 31 and Swimming New Zealand will sign off its selections by the end of the following week.

Rignall and Kent are real medal hopes. Rignall has been ranked as high as four in the world, but is well down now and hasn't been at recent world meets. However, she will not face event leaders Inge de Brujin of the Netherlands or Therese Alshammer from Sweden at the Games.

Kent was fourth in the 400m at the world short-course event at Moscow this month, is ranked eighth in the world in that event, and of those who beat him only Canadian Brian Jones will be at Manchester. He is ranked 16th in the world in 200m and has Jones and two Australians ahead of him.

There was an acceptance that swimmers had under-performed at the last Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur, said executive director Catriona McBean, but it was hoped that the promise shown by the team of eight in Sydney would be fulfilled by "a group of young people coming into their own".