Australia’s budding teenage sensation and Olympic hopeful, Kaylee McKeown, set a new world record over the weekend, breaking the six-year old 200m backstroke short course record in Brisbane at the weekend.
McKeown who hails from Queensland, clocked a time of 1:58.94 – scraping 0.29 seconds off the previous record set by Hungarian superstar Katinka Hosszu at the 2014 World Short Course Championships in Doha.
BREAKING: Kaylee McKeown Sets World Short Course Record of 1:58.94 In 200m Backstroke - https://t.co/MirZfI48st pic.twitter.com/N2eCd8Ck2V
— Swimming World (@SwimmingWorld) November 27, 2020
Just last week, McKeown broke the Australian 100m and 200m national record, so it came as no surprise that she went one better this time around, at the Australian national short course swimming championships.
It was a completely different swimming championships this time around with the competition taking place virtually. Instead of being held in Melbourne as originally planned, competitors lined up against each other in virtual format at different venues in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Hobart.
Speaking after the record, McKeown said, “Short course is something we don’t get to do very often so I was excited to see what I could put up after some solid training this year.”
“I headed over to my teammates and my coach and they said ‘you just got a world record’ and I was like, ‘what?’. I didn’t actually know until a few minutes later.”
Now, attention turns to preparing for Tokyo. The Australian flyer has her sights set on next year’s Olympics having already claimed gold over long course in the 50m, silver in the 100m and bronze in the 200m backstroke at the 2018 Youth Olympic Games in Buenos Aires.
