Swimming – Marilyn Kahler crawls in the United States

Just two weeks after returning from the Olympics in Tokyo – including two Austrian records in her bag – Austrian swimming star Marilyn Kahler went to Los Angeles. The crawling specialist now studies and swims there for four years at the University of Southern California.

Schwechaterin does not regret leaving the Südstadt Performance Center: “I would say 100 percent that the step to Los Angeles was worth it, because you simply grow as a person and become stronger. You are forced to grow up here, I think that’s good and it shows strength” .

When it comes to sports development, it is not yet possible to give an exact number for one very simple reason: “The biggest difference in Europe is surely you swim in everything yards away. In other words, the pool is only about 23 meters long. That’s why it’s hard To compare yourself to the times in Austria.”Additional: “But I think there is also a mathematical improvement.”

Arrived in perfect competition mode

Compared to Europe, not only does the length of the swimming lane differ, but the competitions also operate differently. In colleges, teams compete against other universities to win. The Trojans, as USC is called, had duels against UCLA (Friday) and Stanford (Saturday).

“Unfortunately we lost both meetings because they are very, very strong universities. Of course we did our best and got very close to Stanford. We could have had a chance against California as well,” Kahler assesses previous competitions.

The 20-year-old says of her performance: “I can categorize my results from previous meetings as ‘good’. We don’t train for these competitions, that is, we are not ready for any competition and we swim in a normal training session the day before. So these meetings are seen as It’s just training. We don’t even wear a competition suit.”

Swimming event with all universities

The highlights of the season are still waiting for Kahler. From February 23-26, her team will go to PAC-12, one of the most prestigious competitions in college sports: “All the universities on the West Coast will swim against each other.”

Until then, Kahler had two more meetings against UCLA (February 11 and 12).