SWIMMING IRISH NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIPS:THE IRISH National Short Course Championships get under way at the Galway Fáilte Salthill pool in Leisureland today, where 41 teams will be in action, including swimmers from Dubai and Britain, as well as clubs representing all four provinces.
Beijing Olympian Aisling Cooney kicks off day one at 3.30pm with the 50-metre backstroke.
Cooney is one of three swimmers who will line out next week at the European Short Course Championships in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
She will be joined there by Ireland’s newest silver medal heroine, Gráinne Murphy, and Olympian Melanie Nocher, neither of whom are in Galway this week.
Session one also features 2009 World Championship team members Karl Burdis (50m backstroke) and Niamh O’Sullivan (800m freestyle), who train full-time out of the National Aquatic high performance centre in Dublin.
Nocher and Murphy, meanwhile, are continuing their preparations for the meet in Eindhoven, and Nocher, twice a finalist at previous European Short Course Championships, is showing decent form ahead of next week’s event.
Competing at the British University and Colleges’ Championships in Sheffield last weekend for Loughborough University, Nocher returned impressive swims in the 200m and 400m freestyle events.
She was just outside the Irish short course record in the 200m freestyle in an impressive time of one minute 57.59 seconds, while, in the 400m freestyle, she broke the Irish record by five seconds in a very fast 4:05.89.
The last time a National Championship was held in Leisureland was in 2003, when Swim Ireland staged the famous annual Leisureland International Meet, which saw world champions Therese Alshammer, Mark Foster and Jon Olsen lining out to display their talents.
