Samuel Cann and Emma Bourgaize have had a great weekend at South East Regionals.
The Winchester Leisure Centre 50m pool was the venue for the 1st weekend of the South East regional Swimming Championships. The South East region is one of the largest with thousands of swimmers. Qualifying times are no longer used with each event having a limit on the number of accepted swimmers ranging from 34 for the 50m events, 26 for the 100m, 20 for the 200m events down to the top 8 swimmers in 1500m. The times having had to be achieved in previous licenced meets and checked against Swim England rankings.
Samuel Cann 13 and Emma Bourgaize 14 represented the Guernsey Swimming Club. Samuel swam in the 50m Butterfly where he got a good start increasing his speed with a fast finish knocking over half a second off his entered time, finishing in a new long course personal best time of 33.39. He also had a good strong swim in the 100m breaststroke finishing in 1:30.06, just 0.30 outside previous long course time.
14 Year old Emma Bourgaize had an outstanding weekend making both finals. Emma was ranked 15 going into the 100m butterfly and although she went out a bit too fast she still managed to finish strongly taking 1.80 seconds off her long course pb in 1:08.50 ranking in 6th place. She changed her race plan for the final deciding not to going out as quick for the first 50m but finished a lot stronger bettering her time from the heats finishing 5th overall in 1:07.99 which ranks her 22 in the UK.
Again she had a good strong swim in the 50m Breaststroke getting a good start finishing with another new long course PB of 36.36 making the final ranked in 6th place in a very high quality competitive event. In the final Emma worked very hard improving her time again to finish in 5th place in 36.26
Both Samuel and Emma have qualified for events in the second half of the regionals for their age group to be held over the weekend 13 & 14 May also in Winchester.
