Swimming

Kaylee McKeown Commits to Swim the 200 IM at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games

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By Braden Keith on SwimSwam

2024 AUSTRALIAN OPEN CHAMPIONSHIPS

One of the big ‘will she/won’t she’ questions of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games got an answer on Wednesday evening on the Gold Coast of Australia.

Kaylee McKeown, who swam a new Australian Record of 2:06.99 in the 200 IM final, committed to swim the event in a post-race interview.

“Absolutely, I’m up for the challenge,” said the 22-year-old who was the 2023 World Champion in all three races. “It’ll be hard … but I feel like I’m putting myself in a good position to test myself to do the best I can.”

At the 2023 World Championships, the last globally-attended meet, a marquee matchup in the 200 IM was interrupted when McKeown was disqualified for an illegal turn in the semi-finals. But her 2:06, plus her commitment, means the showdown is on, for now, for the Olympic Games.

Swimming the 200 IM through the rounds still leaves her with one fewer race than she had at the World Championships (no 50 back at the Olympics): 100 back, 200 back, 200 IM, women’s 400 medley relay, and mixed 400 medley relay. But it’s not necessarily the quantity of swims over the nine day meet that is the problem. The primary conflict is that the semi-finals of the 200 back comes in the same session as the finals of the 200 back, where McKeown will face another big battle against American Regan Smith, plus a World Record chase.

The good news for McKeown is that the 200 backstroke final is early in the session at 8:39PM, while the 200 IM finishes the session at 10:34PM. She should have no problem qualifying for the final, even on a second swim, and then the only real conflict to the 200 back is having the 200 IM prelims session the same morning – though she demonstrated on Wednesday that swimming fast in the morning and the evening of the same day is no problem for her (she was 2:08 in prelims of the 200 IM at the Australian Championships).

If Canadian sensation Summer McIntosh commits to the event, then it becomes the race of the year, with five different legitimate contenders with five different sets of strengths and weaknesses demonstrating what makes these medley events so core to the swimming experience.

The below splits comparison shows those strengths and weaknesses, with green being relative strengths and red being relative weakness.

What’s not fully-demonstrated in the splitting is what McKeown is what she’s capable of. In prelims, she swam 2:08.66 including a 35.52 breaststroke split – one that would be the fastest in this field by over a second.

While no awards are given for fastest breaststroke split (if Douglass, a 2:19 200 breaststroker, wanted to go for ‘best breaststroke split,’ she probably could have it), that shows that she’s capable of competing with any of the above swimmers on any leg of this race, and might still have improvements to make with further tinkering to her pacing strategy.

With outrageous times going on the board on a near-daily basis since February, the tensions ahead of this summer gets more-and-more exciting by the week.

SwimSwam: Kaylee McKeown Commits to Swim the 200 IM at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games

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