Mainstone’s Hattrick Sets Sights on Barcelona

WAIS athlete Rhys Mainstone has won a third consecutive 10km open water national championship after taking victory at the 2013 Australian titles at Lake Macquarie.

Mainstone’s dominant performance has put the UWA club swimmer firmly in sight of world championship selection for the Australian team set to compete in Barcelona this July at the FINA World Championships.

A lot of talk before the race had been focused on the sibling pair of Trent and Cody Grimsey, but it was the Broome raised, Perth based Mainstone that would take the headlines, establishing a healthy lead on the second of eight laps to win ahead of another Perth based athlete in Simon Huitenga and 2012 London Olympian Jarrod Poort.

Mainstone acknowledged post victory that he was pleased his pre-race plan had come together but admitted he’d had to dig deep for the win.

“My tactic for this race was to go out fairly hard and try and hold my distance against all the other guys. I know I do all the work in training to hold them off, so I just had to maintain my average speed,” he said.

“I was hurting on that last lap but I just put my head down and went for it.”

Completing a highly successful weekend of racing, Mainstone backed up a day later to win silver behind Poort in the men’s 5km open water event, creating an opportunity for two individual swims at the Barcelona world titles.

The race was anyone’s for the taking with the top eight finishers all recording times within five seconds of one another.

After settling for bronze in the 10km race yesterday, Poort proved too strong in the shorter distance today, with the 1500m freestyle Olympic representative using his back-end speed to his advantage.

“I guess I was able to draw on that little bit of speed I have from my pool swimming to help with the sprint at the end and helped me win the 5km,” he said.

“Because no one had broken away I spent the last lap planning, getting into a good position, I stuck to Rhys [Mainstone] and Sam [Sheppard] was there too, and we just turned it on at the end,” Poort said.

– with Swimming Australia