Chris Dunn Storms to Two Master’s World Records

While the younger end of the club were competing at Herts County Champs at the weekend, our most senior swimmer, Chris Dunn, travelled to Crawley to compete in the Master’s Long Course Championships. Now in the 80-84 year age category, Chris competed in seven events over the weekend – quite a feat for anyone, regardless of age. He had a very successful meet earning himself gold medals in all of them along with a plethora of new records!

Chris raced the 50m, 100m, 200m 400m and 800m freestyle events plus the 100m and 200m backstrokes. His 50m free was completed in a very speedy 32.35 seconds and saw him set a new British record by over a second. In the 100m free, he stormed to victory in 1:13.49, this time taking a whopping 4 seconds off the previous British record! Amazingly, in the 200m free, Chris smashed the previous British record by 18 seconds! His time of 2:38.32 was also a European and World record! Another set of British, European and World records came in the 400m free where he recorded a time of 5:42.79 which was a drop of 50 seconds from the record he broke. The 800m free saw another British and European record. His new record time of 11:55.54 was an incredible 1 minute and 15 seconds faster than the previous mark.

Not content with medals and records in just the freestyle events, Chris also added a couple of backstroke titles to his name. He lowered the 200m backstroke British record by 35 seconds to a very impressive 3:11.53. The 100m backstroke British record was also reset in 1:29.19 which was a 7 second improvement from the previous time.

I think we can all agree that these are an amazing set of results and records. Well done Chris!