US great Michael Phelps yesterday said he was coming back into form for the Shanghai world championships as China stood on the verge of a historic sweep of the diving medals.
Phelps said he was out to avenge some stinging upsets this year, including two 200m butterfly losses to China’s Wu Peng which ended a nine-year winning streak that the American had hoped to continue until retirement.
The 14-time Olympic champion, 26, will be the star attraction in the pool events from tomorrow as he begins his campaign for the London Olympics, which he insists will be his last Games.
“I think the last six to eight months have been really good, leading up to this, being able to have some solid training, some consistent training,” Phelps said.
“Having those races [against Wu] happen earlier in the year hopefully I was able to learning something from them and I can swim faster here,” he added.
Excitement is building for the swimming events, which were boosted when Brazilian sprint champion Cesar Cielo was cleared to compete despite testing positive for a banned diuretic.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport let Cielo, 24, off with a warning on Thursday, dismissing calls by world governing body FINA for a three-month ban.
Meanwhile, defending titleholder He Chong sealed China’s eighth gold medal of the championships yesterday as the hosts drew tantalizingly close to winning all 10 events.
Teammate Qin Kai was vying with He for the title until he slipped on his fifth dive and crashed into the water, a rare mistake which left him out of the medals in fourth place.
“I feel really sad, because I have trained very hard over the years. Maybe it is a precious experience for me,” a downcast Qin said.
Until Qin’s mishap, China had enjoyed a one-two in every individual diving event, underscoring their total dominance of the discipline in which they won seven golds at the 2009 worlds and seven of eight at the Beijing Olympics.
Chinese diving icon Wu Minxia topped the semi-finals of the women’s 3m springboard and will expect to add to her giant personal tally in the final today.
Earlier, Germany’s Thomas Lurz was hailed as an all-time great as he sealed his fifth world championships open water title in a dramatic 5km race at Jinshan City Beach.
Lurz left it desperately late before overhauling Greek rival Spyros Gianniotis in the final meters of the grueling event.
Bronze medalist Evgeny Drattsev of Russia said Lurz, who also won the event in 2005, 2007 and 2009 — when he also won the 10km — had proved himself as one of the great athletes.
“Lurz is a very strong swimmer. He is a great athlete in history,” Drattsev said.
In the women’s event, Switzerland’s Swann Oberson took gold with Aurelie Muller claiming France’s first medal of the world championships and American Ashley Twichell taking bronze.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
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