When Florian Wellbrock jumps into the Sea of Japan in Fukuoka at eight o’clock on Sunday morning, he will swim there to get to the Seine without having to cross the Persian Gulf. The top three swimmers in the world championship race over the Olympic 10 km distance qualify for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.
Wellbrock is the most successful German swimmer since Michael Groß, in Tokyo 2021 he swam over ten kilometers to Olympic victory in an impressive manner. He would like to avoid having to make a second attempt at qualifying in Qatar’s capital Doha in February, less than six months before the opening of the Summer Games in Paris, when the 2024 World Swimming Championships will be held there.
“Paris is always a little bit in the back of my mind and at the same time feels incredibly far away. There are pros and cons going on in your head. In the pool, I can secure my starting place with a place in the top four via the German Swimming Association. Tickets are issued, you position yourself in the world rankings based on the races and see: they are strong, maybe they are not that strong.
It’s all clearly focused on the Olympics. But you still have to keep your focus on the World Championships in order to be able to perform well there,” says Wellbrock in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper about the World Championships in Japan, which will be continued next weekend after the open water competitions in the pool.
Two season highlights
“Not optimal,” said national coach Bernd Berkhahn in a video conference on Thursday, is the scheduling of another world championship by the world association six months before the Olympics.
After all, all coaches want to avoid preparing their best swimmers for two season highlights. “This completely blows apart the methodology that has been practiced for decades. Basically nobody wants to start there. Nobody needs the World Cup, I don’t think it will be very crowded.”
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Berkhahn expects a “very, very fast race” from the men. At 26.2 degrees Celsius, the water temperature will be “not nearly as bad” as in Tokyo. In addition, the course around the buoys is narrower, a lap is 1.6 kilometers instead of 2.5 kilometers as at the Olympics two years ago, so that the swimmers can stock up more often.
In the fight for the World Championship medals and the Olympic qualification with an outside temperature of around 30 degrees Celsius in the early morning, it will not least be important to stay hydrated in the black suit and to compensate for the “enormous water loss” (Berkhahn).