New Zealand added two more swimming medals at the Glasgow Commonwealth Games on Sunday, with Erika Fairweather and Hazel Ouwehand each touching the wall in third place to give the small Kiwi team four medals after two nights in the pool.
Fairweather, the Dunedin freestyler who has carried much of the team’s medal hopes, took bronze in the women’s 200m freestyle final. She clocked 1min 55.24sec to finish behind Australia’s Mollie O’Callaghan, who won gold in 1min 54.66sec, and O’Callaghan’s compatriot Lani Pallister, who claimed silver in 1min 55.01sec. Fairweather’s swim was a fraction outside the 1min 55.06sec national record she set in May, and it backed up the silver she won in the 400m freestyle on the opening night.
“A 200m medal was always going to be a stretch so I’m really happy to come away with it,” Fairweather told reporters after the race, as RNZ reported. The 200m freestyle is one of the deepest events in world swimming, and the two Australians ahead of her are among the fastest women ever over the distance, so a place on the podium was a strong result rather than a disappointment.
Minutes earlier, Hazel Ouwehand had given New Zealand its first medal of the night in the women’s 50m butterfly. Ouwehand held her nerve in the shortest and most unforgiving event on the programme, touching in 25.76sec for third. Australia’s Alex Perkins won gold in 25.37sec and South Africa’s Erin Gallagher took silver in 25.57sec, leaving the three medallists separated by less than four tenths of a second.
It was a breakthrough moment for the 26-year-old, who was swimming in her first Commonwealth Games final. Ouwehand, who trains in Auckland and works as an accountant alongside her swimming, has had a long road back to this level. She was the only member of the New Zealand swimming team not to reach a final at the 2022 Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast, and she missed selection for the 2024 world championships, so a maiden Games medal in Glasgow marked a genuine turnaround.
“It’s such a short race, there’s very little room for error and it’s just head down and go,” Ouwehand said of the 50m sprint, as quoted by Stuff. In a one-length dash there is no time to settle into a rhythm or reel in a rival, and the ability to hold form under that pressure is exactly what carried her onto the podium.
The double bronze lifted New Zealand’s tally to four medals after two days of competition, all of them won in the pool. Fairweather’s silver in the 400m freestyle and Lewis Clareburt’s silver in the men’s 200m individual medley on Saturday got the campaign under way, and the two bronze medals on Sunday kept the momentum going. For a team that arrived in Scotland as one of the smallest New Zealand has sent to a Commonwealth Games in more than four decades, an early haul built almost entirely on the swimmers has been a welcome start.
New Zealand named a squad of 114 athletes for this edition of the Games, which has been stripped back to a leaner programme of sports centred on Glasgow rather than spread across a whole nation. That reduced scale has put extra weight on the traditional medal sports, and swimming has answered the call in the opening days. The performances of Fairweather, Clareburt and Ouwehand mean the team has already matched a solid share of its likely medal count before the athletics and other events get properly under way.
Fairweather remains the swimmer most likely to add to that total. Still only in her early twenties, she has grown into one of the most consistent middle-distance freestylers in the Commonwealth, and she has more events to come in Glasgow. Having collected a silver and a bronze in her first two finals, she will fancy her chances of climbing a step higher before the pool programme is done. Clareburt, a world-class medley and butterfly swimmer, is also expected to feature in more finals.
For Ouwehand, the medal is a reward for persistence as much as speed. Sprint butterfly is an event where hundredths of a second decide the outcome and where a single mistimed stroke can drop a swimmer out of the medals entirely. To come through that on the biggest stage of her career, years after being the one Kiwi swimmer left out of the finals last time around, is the kind of story that tends to stick with an athlete long after the Games are over.
New Zealand’s swimmers return to the pool for further finals in the coming days, with the wider team’s medal hopes then shifting to the track, the velodrome and the other venues around Glasgow as the Games build towards their second week. You can read the NZ Herald’s report and the Otago Daily Times coverage for more on the two bronze medals.
Are you following the Glasgow Commonwealth Games, and which Kiwi athletes are you backing to reach the podium? Share your thoughts 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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