When the results for the 200-yard freestyle preliminaries came out Friday morning, it was pretty easy to say that Brett Pinfold and his teammates were excited. Of the nine swimmers entered in prelims, six of those qualified for the three heats of finals, and the other three came extremely close in the Badgers' fifth-place finish at the Big Ten Championships last week.
“I was pretty happy,” Pinfold, a junior, said. “It was pretty cool seeing everyone swimming fast, especially in one of our team’s best events.”
In addition to Pinfold, who took sixth, the other finalists included Cannon Clifton (8th), Matt Hutchins (10th), Anthony Lyons (13th), Ryan Stack (16th) and Sean Maloney (20th).
Pinfold’s motivation to swim fast in finals was due partially to Clifton, who was also in his heat.
“I didn’t want to lose to [Cannon], let alone another swimmer,” Pinfold said.
This motivation to race against teammates didn’t just ring true for Pinfold, who also had to race fellow Badger Austin Byrd in the finals of the 200-yard backstroke, where he netted a seventh-place finish.
“I really like racing my teammates,” Byrd, who took third in the event with a career-best time, said. “We can kind of feed off each other. [Brett] knew exactly what I was going to do [in the 200 back]. I actually told him before the race I was going to push him at that second 50, and I did, made him go faster, and that worked out for both of us.”
Pinfold wasn’t the only one Byrd was observing throughout the season, though. He had been keeping an eye on Tristan Sanders of Michigan and Bob Glover of Indiana, who finished 1-2 in the event, both besting Byrd by only three-tenths of a second.
“I’d been following them the whole year and I knew it was going to be close, and it was,” Byrd said. “It was a fun race.”
Hutchins also had a very successful championship meet. The New Zealander took second in both of his signature distance events, the 500-yard freestyle and the mile, as well as a tenth-place finish in the aforementioned 200 free.
Hutchins took a gamble and came into the meet with a little bit of a different training schedule than most of his competitors, because he is focusing on NCAAs and his country’s Olympic Trials, both of which occur in a little over a month.
“I was just rested enough to keep myself competitive, but I was shaved,” Hutchins said. “There’s a lot more taper and rest to come.”
With the whole meet coming down to the wire for fourth place on Saturday night, Wisconsin’s 400 freestyle relay team of Clifton, Pinfold, Stack and Ryan Barsanti broke the school record in 2:52.69 and automatically qualified to swim at next month’s NCAAs. Unfortunately, this was not enough to overtake Minnesota, whose divers placing 2-3-4 in the second to last event of the night proved a bit too much for the Badgers to handle.
“I believe everyone on the team did what they needed to do,” Byrd said. “Minnesota pulled away with the diving, so there wasn’t really much we could have done. We had a fantastic meet as a team though.”
The Badger men and women who have qualified will see their next action at next month’s NCAA Championship meet in Atlanta, Ga., March 24.
