Newcomer Chris Smith, Michael Houlie are SA’s last hopes of silverware at swimming world champs

Teen newcomer Chris Smith and US-based student Michael Houlie are South Africa’s last hopes of avoiding a dry world short-course championships in Budapest when they bid to land the country’s first medals tonight — in the same event.

Houlie, the 2018 Youth Olympic champion, won his 50m breaststroke heat in 25.77sec, clocking the fourth-fastest time of the morning yesterday.

Then the 24-year-old led the field throughout the first semifinal, but he made the mistake of gliding into the wall at the death, and that cost him two spots as 18-year-old Smith touched first in a 25.66sec world junior record.

Ilya Shymanovich of Belarus, swimming as a neutral, was second in 25.67 with Houlie third in 25.69. 

With Russian Kirill Prigoda winning the second semifinal in 25.48, followed by China’s Haiyang Qin in 25.60, Smith heads into the final seeded third and Houlie sixth.

The last time South Africa failed to win a medal at this 25m gala was at Indianapolis 2004, where an understrength team went to battle without their medal-winning freestyle stars from the Athens Olympics.

Two decades later and the team is without a few stars. Breaststroke queen Tatjana Smith has retired, meaning the South African squad, for the first time since 2008, has no reigning Olympic medallist leading them into the new Games cycle.

Also missing are backstroke ace Pieter Coetzé and individual medley battler Matthew Sates, who has yet to find his form from more than two years ago. Sates boasted personal bests that would have earned him silverware in Hungary this week, although Smith and Coetzé would have needed personal bests to reach the podium.

Short-course competition, swum over 25m laps that are half the length of an Olympic pool, is getting tougher with more top swimmers taking part. And that is an endorsement for Rebecca Meder, who first made her name locally as a 14-year-old, winning five senior titles at the 2017 national championships.

She qualified for finals in four individual events in Hungary — the 100m and 200m breaststroke and 100m and 200m IM — finishing fifth once and sixth on three occasions while cracking African records and personal bests.

Houlie, Smith and Ruard van Renen, in the 100m backstroke, were the only others to make finals at the gala which ends today.

Yesterday Caitlin de Lange lowered her own African record to 24.14 in the women’s 50m freestyle heats, but slowed slightly to 24.21 in the semifinals.

Meder, 22, has stepped into the limelight of swimming, with her emergence coming at a time veteran Chad Le Clos, 10 years older, appears to be close to joining Smith on the sidelines. He arrived in Budapest as the defending champion in the 100m and 200m butterfly and was unable to make the final in either event.

Meder found herself competing against the world’s best. American Kate Douglass, who dethroned Smith as the 200m breaststroke Olympic champion in Paris, broke the world record in that event as well as the 200m IM. Another American, Gretchen Walsh, torpedoed eight individual records herself, including in the 100m IM. In the 100m breaststroke China’s Qianting Tang missed the record by one-hundredth of a second.

“I had a surreal moment the other day when I was in the same heat as Lilly King, Ruta Meilutyte and Yuliya Efimova and then later Kate Douglass — breaststroke legends who I have watched since I was small.”

Meder, who has rekindled her love affair with breaststroke, rose to the occasion with personal bests in the breaststroke and African records in her IM events. “I’ve always enjoyed breaststroke and I achieved in the 100 and 200 when I was younger,” said Meder, who competed in only the 200m IM at the Olympics.

“The last few years I have focused on the medley. Being a medley specialist, I should be doing well and achieve in all the strokes. But I’ve recently fallen in love with the breaststroke again, so I’ll probably add it to my list of events.”