Swimming Relay teams confirmed for Olympics

New Zealand Swimming’s three relay teams have been confirmed today for the London Olympics.  

The women’s 4x100m freestyle relay, men’s 4x200m freestyle and 4x100m medley relay teams have all made the cut for one of the four remaining spots when the qualifying period finished at the weekend.  

The confirmation was made today by FINA, the sport’s ruling body, with the New Zealand team now officially at 16 swimmers for London. New Zealand will contest four relays in London with the women’s 4x200m freestyle already named after qualifying with their eighth place finish at last year’s world championships. The top 12 teams at the 2011 world championships qualified automatically for London with the next four fastest nations in a FINA sanctioned event up until last weekend completing the final Olympic line-up.  

The quartet of Tash Hind, Penelope Marshall, Amaka Gessler and Hayley Palmer will swim the 4x100m freestyle relay, with their national record time of 3:41.10 at the March Olympic Trials proving to be the second fastest time of the non-qualified nations behind Italy.  

The men’s 4x100m medley relay combination of Gareth Kean, Glenn Snyders, Daniel Bell and Carl O’Donnell set a time of 3:35.09 at the Trials, second fastest of non-qualified nations behind Hungary.  

The quartet of Matthew Stanley, Steven Kent, Dylan Dunlop-Barrett and Andrew McMillan set a national record of 7:14.05 in the 4x200m freestyle relay which is also second fastest to Hungary.  

Further additions to the team could come at the weekend at the final qualifying for the 10km Open Water swim in Portugal. Jonathan Pullon (Waterhole, Auckland) and Kane Radford (Rotorua, High Performance Centre) in the men and Queensland-based Cara Baker (Howick Pakuranga) and Charlotte Webby (AquaBladz, Taranaki) in the women will compete with the first New Zealander home in each race to qualify, subject to finishing in the top nine.