Congratulations to our fantastic

Congratulations to our fantastic masters swimmers, who are winging their way back from Italy. You were all amazing, and by far the most competitive bunch that has ever left our shores to compete on the World stage.

Our swimmers broke 4 World Records - Terry Downes, Bev McCarney, Sanderina Kruger and Edith Otterman. Bev McCarney was the brightest star, making a clean sweep of her five events and achieving a world record 31.99 in the 50 Backstroke.

RSA made twelve 1st places, 15 second places, 9 third, 16 fourth, 9 fifth - contributing to 103 top ten places overall! - considering that our swimmers completed 254 swims we would probably manage a World Handicap Trophy! For that matter Cape Town may have come close if there was such a trophy?

Fastest Mens' time 25.34s by Nick Winstone of Linrand - which earned him 12th place in the mens 25-29 age group. Fastest woman was Edith Otterman in a blistering 26.53s World Record Time (at this speed Edith ought to be representing South Africa in Athens - I'm serious! - a quick call to the IOC is needed).

Well done to Bev and Ina for representing Highway and for achieving best 6th and 21st places respectively. Well done Ina for your first time out and against such tough competition. Graham Du Toit, Alan Blades and Bev McCarney all achieved outstanding top ten finishes for East Coast Masters.

In the diving events South Africa had three divers, all from De Jong Diving in Pretoria, Sarie Coltman who did best with 3rd places in both 1m and 3m springboard, Rhett Gardner 55-59 who achieved 4th place in the platform section, and Ron Fyfe 4th in 3m and platform - Ron is in the 65-69 age group - could you see yourself diving from 10m at that age? Really well done Ron!

Old Eds also put in a Mens water polo team which achieved 3rd place in their group, with one win and two losses.

Hope you enjoy the results, which I've sorted a few different ways. The results were extracted from the adobe acrobat pdf format off the www.masters2004.it website which is the nicest World Masters website I've seen and easiest to get around (even though the articles are in Italian). If you want more result details be warned that you can only download one event at a time - it took ages to get a full set.

Lastly I must mention a few people whose achievements in Italy brought home to me their great commitment to Masters in South Africa and their bright personalities that make us recognizable. This is a personal and subjective assessment after going through each event, male, female and age group to extract our results - and after 13 years of watching who's who in SA Masters (not counting all out stars like Terry and Sanderina). SA Masters Commitment and Guts awards to: