Carles Coll, to the final of the 200 European styles with a medal option

The young specialists in speed continue to feed the hope of Spanish swimming, which is trying to get its head out.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
16 August 2022 Tuesday 12:35
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Carles Coll, to the final of the 200 European styles with a medal option

The young specialists in speed continue to feed the hope of Spanish swimming, which is trying to get its head out. The promising 4th place in the 4x100 freestyle relay on Saturday, with a Spanish record, has been joined by the option of a medal - feasible - for one of its members, Carles Coll, from Tarragona, only 20 years old, who slipped into the final of the 200 styles (this Wednesday, at 6:37 p.m., on Teledeporte).

The CN Sabadell bracista, in his "first long-course semifinal in an international competition" -as he acknowledged-, achieved the sixth fastest time among the 16 semifinalists, only 0.89 seconds behind the Portuguese Gabriel José Lopes.

But the great merit of Coll is that, being a rookie in international competitions in the 50 m pool, he entered the semifinal with the second fastest time of the 27 swimmers in the morning preliminaries, 1.62 seconds behind Lopes. And in the afternoon he came within 0.89 of the Portuguese, just one hundredth behind Desplanches, Razzetti and Polonsky, 5th, 4th and 3rd. That is, just one hundredth of the theoretical bronze. In the final, Coll is a serious medal option.

Carles Coll is a member of the 4x100 quartet that came fourth in the European final on Saturday, just 1.03 seconds from bronze, and set a new Spanish record for the distance, 3m13s73, which lowered the established national record by three seconds at the Rio Games.

With him were his peers Sergio de Celis (22), from CN Sabadell, Mario Mollà (20), from CN Terrassa, and Luis Domínguez (19), from EM El Olivar, the quartet spearheading the young and promising speed spanish

Carlos Garach, from Granada, obtained a meritorious 6th place in the final of the 1,500 free, which was won by the Ukrainian Mykhaylo Romanchuk, who was about to not attend the European Championships for enlisting in his country's army in the face of the Russian invasion.