Niluka suffers second defeat; Abeysinghe to compete today

TOKYO, July 26 – Sri Lanka swimming coach Manoj Abeysinghe said it is too early to predict anything on tomorrow’s Olympic Games Men’s 100m freestyle heats where Matthew Abeysinghe will be competing.

“It’s not easy to predict anything right now because we could not make the ideal preparations due to COVID-19 pandemic.

True it affected everybody but we cannot judge how much valuable training period we have lost,” he said.

“It’s not the same volume of training we put in for the last 2016 Olympics or even 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games. Hence we have to swim here and see how we stand,” coach Abeysinghe said.

Matthew Abeysinghe, with an entry timing of 50.31 seconds for Men’s 100m heats, will swim in lane two of heat four tomorrow (27).

Only Zimbabwe’s Peter Wetzlar who swims in lane 8 has a worse entry timing than the Lankan in heat four.

Four of them competing in heat four have done under 50 seconds with Armenia’s Artur Barsegnyan has the best entry timing of 49.96 seconds.

Caeleb Dressel of the US, who is drawn in heat 9 has the best entry timing of 49.96 seconds among all 71 swimmers competing in nine heats. Top 16 will qualify to swim in the semi-finals of 100m freestyle.

Meanwhile, Sri Lanka shuttler Niluka Karunaratne suffered his second defeat in the Men’s Singles qualifying round when he went down to Nhat NguYen of Ireland in straight sets at Musashino Forest Plaza today.

However, Karunaratne who lost his opening match in 41 minutes fared little better in battling out for 52 minutes before losing 0-2 in the match played today.

The first set lasted for 22 minutes and the second for 30 as he went down to the Irish 16-21, 14-21.

Karunaratne, playing in his third successive Olympics after London 2012 and Rio 2016, suffered a similar 0-2 defeat in his opening singles match to Tsz-Wei Wang of Taipei 12-21, 15-21 two days ago.

Margaret MacNeil won first Gold Medal for Canada in the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 after finishing first in the Women’s 100m butterfly.

Twenty one-year-old MacNeil, finished with a time of 55.59 seconds, setting an Americas continental record at her first Olympics. “I could hardly see anyone on the far side of the pool. I think that helped me a lot, because I was able to just focus on my own race,” she said after the race.

“I just put my head down and tried to get to the wall as fast as possible. I’m really glad it all came together. I like to check the scoreboard pretty quickly. But it’s hard just because I don’t have contact lenses. It does take me a minute to read the scoreboard, so I was just trying to squint and see where I came,” she said.