Erika Fairweather has won bronze in the women’s 200m freestyle on the opening night of the Pan Pacific Swimming Championships in California, and taken a hundredth of a second off her own New Zealand record while she was at it.
The 22-year-old touched in 1m 55.05s at the William Woollett Jr Aquatics Centre in Irvine, finishing behind Australia’s Lani Pallister, who won in 1m 53.67s, and Canada’s Summer McIntosh, who took silver in 1m 53.86s. Swimming New Zealand described the swim as a career best and confirmed it as a new national mark.
The improvement on the record was about as small as an improvement can be. Fairweather’s previous best was 1m 55.06s, set in May this year, so the new figure is one hundredth of a second quicker. In a 200m race that is roughly the length of a fingernail. It still counts, and it means the fastest 200m freestyle ever swum by a New Zealander is now a little faster than it was a day ago.
She had gone into the final as the second quickest qualifier, behind Pallister, and she was a finalist in the same event at the Paris Olympics in 2024. RNZ reported the result as New Zealand’s first medal of the meet.
What makes the swim worth pausing on is that the 200m freestyle is not really Fairweather’s event. She is a middle and distance freestyler whose reputation was built over 400m and further, and the shorter race has always been the one where she is racing sprinters as much as she is racing the clock. Holding third in a field containing Pallister and McIntosh, two of the best swimmers in the world across a range of distances, is a solid night’s work rather than a disappointment.
It also continues a pattern that has followed her all winter. At the Glasgow Commonwealth Games in July, Fairweather won five medals, three silver and two bronze, and each of the silvers came behind Pallister. The Australian beat her in the 400m, the 800m and the 1500m freestyle. Fairweather took bronze in the 200m freestyle and another in the 4x200m freestyle relay. The NZ Herald reported that the haul made her the first New Zealand woman in any sport to win five medals at a single Commonwealth Games, and that only Danyon Loader, back in 1994, had managed five before her.
Glasgow was a small Games by recent standards, run across four venues with 10 sports, and New Zealand finished sixth on the medal table with 36 medals from 114 athletes, as NEWS WIRE reported at the time. Fairweather alone accounted for five of those medals.
The event she will really want this week comes later. Fairweather is the reigning world champion over 400m freestyle, having won the title in Doha in 2024 in 3m 59.44s, which made her New Zealand’s first gold medallist at a World Aquatics Championships. The year before that she took bronze at the world championships in 3m 59.59s and became only the fifth woman in history to break four minutes for the distance. On the Swimming New Zealand schedule the women’s 400m freestyle heats and final fall on Saturday 15 August New Zealand time, with the 800m freestyle on Sunday 16 August.
Fairweather was born and raised in Dunedin and now trains at North Shore under coach Graham Hill. She is one of 15 New Zealand swimmers at the championships.
Several of the rest had good nights of their own. Caitlin Deans, of Neptune and Swim Dunedin, swam a personal best of 16m 07.44s in the women’s 1500m freestyle to place fifth overall in the fastest timed final, an event won by the American Katie Ledecky, who has now gone unbeaten in the distance for more than a decade. Hazel Ouwehand won the B final of the women’s 50m butterfly in 26.13s, a time quicker than the seventh place Zoe Pedersen recorded in the A final at 26.45s. Milan Glintmeyer set an 18 year age group record of 1m 00.34s in the heats of the women’s 100m backstroke and then finished third in the B final in 1m 00.74s. Lewis Clareburt, who won two golds in Glasgow, was third in the B final of the men’s 200m freestyle in 1m 46.47s, with his stronger individual medley events still to come. Cameron Gray placed seventh in the B final of the men’s 50m butterfly in 24.10s.
The championships themselves carry more weight than usual. The Otago Daily Times noted that this is the first Pan Pacific meet since 2018, the intervening editions having been lost to the pandemic and the reshuffled calendar that followed. The field is drawn from the United States, Australia, Canada and Japan, which is to say four of the strongest swimming nations on earth, and there are no easy heats in it. The ODT also pointed out that Australia is here without some of its biggest names, including Mollie O’Callaghan, the Olympic champion over 200m freestyle who won the same event in Glasgow.
For New Zealand swimmers the meet is useful precisely because it is hard. A domestic season and even a Commonwealth Games can only tell an athlete so much about where they sit against the Americans and the Japanese, who tend not to turn up to either. Racing this field in an ordinary August, with no title on the line, is the closest thing to a dress rehearsal available.
Day two of the competition runs later today New Zealand time, with the women’s 100m freestyle, the men’s 100m freestyle, the men’s 400m individual medley and the women’s 50m backstroke on the programme. The meet finishes on Sunday New Zealand time.
Are you following the Pan Pacs, and do you think Fairweather can go one better over 400m on Saturday? Let us know in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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