Swimming pentathlon for Mat Board

Ngqwele Dube, Sports Correspondent
THE Matabeleland Swimming Board hosted its first pentathlon for the 2016 on Friday night that saw several swimmers dominating their age groups.

A pentathlon is an event in which each swimmer (11 and over) does 50m of each stroke, backstroke, butterfly, freestyle breaststroke and a 200m individual medley. The computer adds up the times for each event and the winner is the swimmer with the fastest time over all five events.

For the 10 and under age groups, swimmers do just the four strokes and the same procedure is used to determine the winner.

Jake Oostindien (13), Maryke Koen (15), Bruce Dale (16), Cory Werret (12) and Courtney McAllister (17) emerged victorious in all the competitions in their respective categories.

Oostindien of Falcons Swimming Club clocked a total time of 5.23.31 minutes while winning the butterfly in 35.31 seconds, backstroke he had a time of 39.08 breaststrokes, 41.06 seconds, freestyle, 31.09 and he clocked 2 minutes 56.77 seconds in the IM.

Crusaders’ Koen had a total time 5:06.05 and for the strokes she achieved 31.21, 36.91, 39.78, 29.13, and 2:49.02 in the butterfly, backstroke, breastroke, freestyle and individual medley respectively.

Werret, who is with Barracudas, had an overall time of 5:28.77 and for the events he swam 36.10 (butterfly), 38.19 (backstroke), 38.68 (breaststroke), 32.53 (freestyle) and 3:03.27 (IM).

Dale of Crusaders clocked a total time four minutes 28.76 seconds while McAllister also of Crusaders swam a total time of five minutes 21.48 seconds.

Brendon Cyprianos (18) dominated the 17 and over age section winning all events but was piped by Mmelwa Netsha to the finish line in the breastroke by 50 milliseconds.