Moss Burmester wins Gold!

Moss Burmester joined swimming's elite when he won gold at the World Short Course Swimming Championships in Manchester this morning.


The 27-year-old from Tauranga simply blasted the 200m butterfly field away with a performance beyond the expectations of team coach Jan Cameron and him to become New Zealand's first individual world short course champion.
Burmester also went within a whisker of joining the flood of new world record-holders at the five-day meet but that mattered little as he stood atop the dais, sporting a gold to match the colour won in the same event at the 2006 Commonwealth Games.
To complete the set is the hardest task of all, winning at the Beijing Olympic Games in August.
"It's a fantastic confidence boost for me and a nice title to have," he said.
"The world record would have been nice to get but I got a big pb (personal best), a Commonwealth record, so I was very happy with that.
"But the real focus is on the Olympics. This has given me a real lift to work even harder now through to Beijing."
He powered away from the field to win in one minute 51.05 seconds, just 0.32sec outside the world record of French swimmer Franck Esposito, who set his mark six years ago.
The only realistic challenge came from highly rated Russian Nikolay Skvortsov who finished strongly but even he was 0.78sec behind Burmester, who only faded slightly over the final 50m.
Cameron said Burmester's performance was the crowning swim of an excellent week for New Zealand and launched him into a new category.
"He's now a world champion. He's got style and substance, he's shown what a true champion he is," she said.
"If you're making the finals here, you're in the world class bracket. If you're winning them then it's another story all together."
New Zealand also picked up a second medal today, bronze to the men's 100m medley relay team of Daniel Bell (backstroke), Glenn Snyders (breaststroke), Corney Swanepoel (butterfly) and Cameron Gibson (freestyle).
Their time of 3min 27.15sec was 8sec faster than any New Zealand combination had ever swum and enough to head off Australia by 0.36sec, although they were well behind winners Russia and the United States.
New Zealanders qualified for 11 finals at the championships and 21 national records were lowered.
"It's the first step in our progress towards Beijing. We're on track but we've got lots of work to do," Cameron said.
"This is a short course competition and it was really for racing purposes.
"I thought we could learn about how to get up and how to win, and they've done that.
"We're better off coming out than we were going in so it's a big success."
Cameron's comments were made to a backdrop of raucous team swimming as the Burmester was acknowledged by his team-mates.
"It's a really happy team, a cohesive team," Cameron said.
"All these swimmers went quicker in the relays than they did in the
individual events."
Burmester cast his mind to the next four months and what would be required to overcome an Olympic field likely to include American sensation Michael Phelps and China's Wu Peng, who were both missing from Manchester.
"It's going to be a tough battle, a close battle for the medals at Beijing," he said.
"It's the pinnacle event so everyone's going to train hard for it and I'll be the same."
As he did at Melbourne, Burmester was significantly faster in the final than the heats.
He was the sixth fastest qualifier in 1min 54.46sec and only scraped into the final by 0.47sec.
New Zealand's only previous short course medal went to a men's relay team in 1995.
No other New Zealanders were involved in finals this morning.
Melissa Ingram was 10th and Helen Norfolk 11th in the women's 200m freestyle heats while Bell was 15th in the men's 200m backstroke.

Golden glow brightens around Burmester (+video) - New Zealand's source for sport, rugby, cricket & league news on Stuff.co.nz

i better add, moss is an ex uwh player and his family all play... his brothers dane and cole are supremely gifted humans. i guess it's topical.

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it's more polite on the grating than on the subs bench

Peter Mankoc, slovenian, has won gold in Manchester at 100m butterfly. He's comming from the same club, where I trained 10 years as a kid. Beeing 7 years older than Peter, I havent had a chance to train with him, but we had the same coach. Mankoc is also a world record holder for 100m medley, and for that he was originally awarded with 500 eur, and later corrected to 4000, as it became a national scandal... as far as I'm conserned, its still a scandal with 4000 eur award for a WR.

To tell the story of how our goverment treat the sports in our country - Mankoc had to borrow the new swimsuit from his british friend Mark Foster, to win this medal!

Go Slovenia !

WOW.... thats amazing...

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Regards,

Marius

"Great works are performed, not by strength but by perseverence" - Samuel Johnson