DELEGATES FROM the Ateneo Swimming team represented the university in the 47th Singapura Finance Singapore National Age Group (SNAG) Championship from March 11 to 20 at the OCBC Aquatic Centre in Singapore.
The international competition invites over 1,000 swimmers who represent different swimming clubs from all over the world. As an officially registered Fédération internationale de natation (FINA) competition, the meet gives its participants a chance to qualify for the upcoming 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. At the conclusion of the meet, however, none of the Ateneo’s swimmers were able to reach the qualifying entry times for the 2016 Olympics.
Prized tankers from the Blue and White include veteran national team swimmers such as Axel Ngui, Jessie Lacuna, and Hannah Dato. Other members of the Blue and White who competed were Aldo Batungbacal, Getty Reyes, Ramona Datu, Julia Balanag, Monique Reyes, and Raegan Gavino.
The meet proved to be difficult for the Philippine squad, who were competing in the Seniors 15-and-over category. Going against star swimmers hailing from Singapore, Japan, and Malaysia, the team fell short in the rankings, with only a select few making it to the top eight.
2012 Olympian Lacuna led the team with the most number of qualified events. The first of the three qualified events was the Men’s 15-and-over 400m Freestyle on March 17. Lacuna clocked a time of 4:02.25 and placed second in the final heat. However, his previous time was faster, as he finished the preliminaries in 4:00.65.
Meanwhile, the blue tanker also performed in the Men’s 15-and-over 200m and 400m individual medley on March 19 and 20, respectively. He placed 10th overall in both events, while further improving his time in the long distance—jumping from 4:40.26 to a time of 4:30.66 in the 400m individual medley.
On the other hand, Ngui qualified for the Men’s 15-and-over 50m backstroke on March 18 by placing in seventh out of 38 swimmers in the preliminaries with a time of 27.60 seconds. Swimming in the B-final heat, Ngui topped his preliminaries time by clocking 27.39 and finished in second place after the heat.
On the third day of the competition, Dato made it to the finals in the Women’s 15-and-over 100m butterfly event. Despite being only a millisecond away from making the PP-A cut-off time in the preliminaries with a time of 1:03.04, Dato still managed to make it to the PP-B finals and finished with a time of 1:03.18.