Not much changed in the last-chance qualifying Junior and Senior Championships in Brazil last week for the senior World Championship team, aside from some relay shuffling, and so the roster for the 2013 World Championships are set: 15 individual swimmers, and 8 additional relay-only contenders.
The majority of this is on the men’s side, with only four women earning the right to race individually. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that Thiago Pereira will swim the same 400 IM in which he was the Olympic silver medalist at the London Olympics. All the Brazilian media was reporting that Pereira was to drop his best event, but instead he’ll swim just the IM races and the 400 medley relay.
Also a big of a surprise is that Cesar Cielo is only thus far named to one event: the 50 free. He hit the FINA “A” standard for the 50 fly, but Brazil had brutally-quick marks for those races, so he won’t be able to defend his World Championship (nor will will Felipe Franca de Silva in the 50 breaststroke.) Cielo has not even been named to be a member of the Brazilian relays, after not swimming the 100 free at Worlds Trials. It’s hard to envision the Brazilian 400 free relay final’ing or medal’ing without him a part of it, as they’ve struggled to do the last few years.
Even not being “named” for the relay.. he can be put up there if needed.
Cielo is going to swim the 50 fly in Barcelona. He didn’t make the brazilian cut, but once he’ll be there, he will swim it. He’s been saying in interviews that he wants to defend his two world titles (50 free and 50 fly).
And Pereira has said that he will not swim the 400 IM in Barcelona. He swam this event in nationals just for training. But he doesn’t want to compete the 400 IM in international stage any longer.
Brazilian team looks seriously not in a position to be a threat in many races . Too Bad ,they have wonderfull swimmers .
But it is good experience for the young swimmers come 2016, and hopefully they can build on this.