03-08-2025
Olivia Nel, Erin Gallagher power SA women to 4x100m medley relay record
Olivia Nel and Erin Gallagher powered the national women's 4x100m medley relay team to the African record in the morning heats at the world championships in Singapore on Sunday, combining with Rebecca Meder and Aimee Canny to second in their heat.
They clocked 3 min 59.47 sec, just 11-100ths of a second behind the neutral athletes' combination who bagged the final eighth spot in the evening final.
Meder, Gallagher and Canny were survivors of the team that set the previous 3:59.63 mark exactly three years to the day earlier at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham.
Newcomer Nel went more than a second faster in the opening backstroke leg, completing the opening 100m in 1:00.33.
Meder, switching from backstroke to breaststroke, touched in 1:07.63, which was understandably slower than the 1:05.56 effort in 2022 by Lara van Niekerk, who was in the form of her life at the time.
Meder, who was laid low by a stomach bug earlier in the gala, is a 200m specialist, but she was still the fastest available 100m breaststroker.
Then Gallagher smashed more than a second off her effort from three years ago as she completed the butterfly in 57.31.
Canny narrowed the gap on the NAB combination considerably as she rounded off the effort with 54.20 in the freestyle.
Had she matched her 53.80 from England the team would have become the first South African relay outfit to make an evening final at a world championships since 2011.
From 2007 to 2011 five South African relay teams made world championship finals, all of them men's.
The last time a South African women's team made a final at a major gala was in the 4x100m medley at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
