National swimmer Joseph Schooling recently took his impressive run to the Fina World Championships, where the Olympic gold medallist smashed the men’s 50m butterfly Asian record twice in Budapest.
The 22-year-old clocked in with a time of 22.93s in the second semi-finals on Sunday evening, beating his own record of 23.05s set during the morning heats, TODAY reported. He finished third in his semi-final and qualified fifth overall for the finals, which will be held on Tuesday morning.
United States’ Caeleb Remel Dressel topped the overall semi-final rankings, clocking in at 22.76s, with Ukraine’s Andrii Govorov taking second place (22.77s) and Brazil’s Nicholas Santos (22.84s) coming in third.
Schooling is hoping to reel in two gold medals, with the other event being the 100m butterfly, and is feeling confident about his chances, despite posting the fifth-best timing. “I’m excited, the most important thing is to make top eight, which I managed to do and it’s anyone’s game tomorrow,” he reiterated.
“I thought it was good, pretty solid, two best times, a little long in the finish, really long, after I took that last stroke, I didn’t really know where I was going to be. I’m just happy to get under 23sec”, he said.
“There’re some big guys next to me, but at the end of the day, you’ve got the lane and you’ve got some space. It really doesn’t matter.”
Schooling is running for three events — the 50m and 100m butterfly, and 100m freestyle — having earlier withdrawn from the 200m butterfly heats, which he also did so during the Rio Olympics. National swimmer Quah Zheng Wen is competing at the world championships as well, in the 100m and 200m butterfly, as well as the 50m, 100m and 200m backstroke events.
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