Contribution by reader

Moscow, Sunday, November 9, 2008 – Over the weekend, Tao Li came away with a silver medal in the 100m Butterfly in a time of 58.95 seconds after only just scraping into the final with a heat swim time of 1min 00.41sec.

Then she backed it up a day later with a swim of 25.78sec in the 50m Butterfly to claim the bronze medal against internationally renowned veteran Swedish Olympian and world champion Therese Alshammar (25.53sec), and resurgent Australian swimmer and current leader of the Female Wwimmer of the Series points tally, Marieke Guehrer (25.58sec). What makes the time and medal remarkable is that she achieved this on only three weeks of training since she got back into the pool after a big break following the Beijing Olympics.

There was only 0.25sec between first place-getter Alshammar and Tao Li, and the Singaporean’s time was not only a new personal best (beating her previous mark of 25.93sec set last weekend during the Singapore leg of the FINA Swimming World Cup) but also only 0.45sec outside of the Short Course World Record for that event (25.32sec) set by Felicity Galvez of Australia in Manchester on April 11 this year.

FINA pays out US$1,500 to first place finishers and US$50,000 to world record breakers during the World Cup series. This is certainly a big incentive for Tao Li, the Asian Games gold medalist in the 100m Butterfly event, to have another crack at beating the clock in Stockholm in another couple of days time.