Swimming World Championship
Wellbrock’s stressful days: only partially simulated in training
Also wants to swim five kilometers for a medal: Florian Wellbrock. Photo: Uncredited/AP/dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
You have to do three competitions with a total of eight kilometers at the highest speed within less than 40 hours. Florian Wellbrock has one goal in mind: three world championship medals.
Florian Wellbrock swims and swims and swims. When the 24-year-old competes in the five-kilometer open water competition at the Swimming World Championships in Lupa Lake on the outskirts of the Hungarian capital Budapest in the morning, it will be his third World Championship race in less than 40 hours.
A mammoth program for which he also has a special goal: three medals. The man from Magdeburg already has two in his pocket after 18 hours: bronze in the 1500 meter freestyle in the pool, gold in the 4×1.5 kilometer relay in open water together with Lea Boy, Oliver Klemet and Leonie Beck.
“The set of medals is now complete and everything that comes now is on top. It’s nice to have bronze, silver and gold together,” said Wellbrock, who had also finished second in the 800-meter freestyle.
Coach Berkhahn believes in further successes
His trainer Bernd Berkhahn is impressed and now believes in more heroic deeds from his protégé. ‘He swam free. This final sprint in the open water race will give him a lot of self-confidence,” said Berkhahn. He prepared the German flagship swimmer well for the World Championships. Not just purely athletic.
Because the stressful days that Wellbrock has imposed on you also have to be able to cope mentally. “We’ve practiced that,” said Berkhahn and explained: “As a coach, you look at the stresses and strains that you have to face at a World Cup and how the performance requirements are then set. And that is then simulated in training.”
This doesn’t happen in the form of races, but with very hard steps and loads, always on three days in a row. “But then you can only partially simulate that, the stress of the competition is higher. You can also simulate it with a series of competitions, but you can’t practice this long competition time,” reported Berkhahn.
Special emphasis is also placed on recreation. So Wellbrock was allowed to sleep a little longer than the others on Sunday after his last pool swim. Longer in this case meant up to 8:30 a.m., before heading to Lake Lupa. He’s not allowed to rest that long on Monday, because his start is already scheduled for 9:00 a.m. After that, he has a day off before the World Championship final over ten kilometers is scheduled for Wednesday. Wellbrock is the defending champion.