Laure Manaudou
Laure currently holds the world record for the 400 m
freestlye at 4:02:13.
On 25 March, 2007 Laure won her 2nd World Championship Women's 400 m
Freestyle in Melbourne swimming very close to her world record with
a time of 4:02:61. She finished 1st in the 200 m Freestyle with a
World Record of 1'55"52 also coming in 2nd in the 800 m Freestyle
with a European Record of 8'18"80.
Laure rounded it off with a 2nd place in the 100 m Backstroke with
another European Record at 59"87 and participated in the 4x200 m
Freestyle setting a new National French Record at 7"55"96. She won the gold medal in the
Women's 400 m Freestyle at the 2004 Athens Olympics. That was
France's first ever gold medal in women's swimming and the
first gold medal won by a French man or woman since Jean
Boiteux's triumph in the 400 m men's freestyle event in
Helsinki in 1952.
Manaudou won the silver medal in the Women's
800 m freestyle at the same Olympics. In that race, she had a
quick start but was passed down the stretch by Ai Shibata from
Japan. She took the bronze medal at the Women's 100 m
backstroke.
She thus became only the second Frenchwoman to
win three medals in a single Summer or Winter Olympic Games.
The first was the late track and field athlete Micheline
Ostermeyer in London in 1948.
She is currently tied for second (three medals altogether) on
the all-time list of French multiple female Winter or Summer
Olympic medal winners along with Micheline Ostermeyer,
Marielle Goitschel, Pascale Trinquet-Hachin, Perrine Pelen,
Anne Briand-Bouthiaux, Marie-José Pérec, Jeannie Longo-Ciprelli
and Félicia Ballanger. The all-time leader is the fencer Laura
Flessel-Colovic, who has five Olympic medals.
She won three gold medals at the 2004 European Swimming
Championships in Madrid for the 100 m backstroke, 400 m
freestyle, and the 4x100 m team medley.
On July 24, 2005 at the 2005 World Aquatics Championships in
Montreal, Canada Manaudou won the Women's 400 m freestyle.
Manaudou was under world record pace for the first half of the
race. In the second half of the race, Manaudou was challenged
by Shibata, her rival from the Olympics.
Pundits were already predicting that Manaudou
would eventually eclipse the world record mark in the 400 m
freestyle set by Janet Evans at the 1988 Summer Olympics. This
would happen on May 12, 2006, as she broke Evans' world record
of 4:03.85 during the final of the French championship in
Tours with the time of 4:03.03.
On August 6, 2006, on the final day of the 2006 European
Swimming Championships in Budapest, she broke her own world
record with a time of 4:02:13 in winning the 400 m freestyle
title. She also won the 800 m freestyle (in European record
time), 200 m individual medley and 100 m backstroke titles.
In addition, she obtained the bronze medal in
the 200 m freestyle, 4x200 m team freestyle and 4x100 m team
medley. With her four titles, she equalled the record of the
number of individual titles won in the same European swimming
championships held by East Germany's Ute Geweniger (1981) and
Hungary's Krisztina Egerszegi (1993).
Her coach is Philippe Lucas. Her club was Melun-Dammarie, and
in 2006 she moved to Le Canet en Roussillon. Her mother Olga
Schippers is of Dutch origin, and played badminton in her
native country.
She is currently engaged to Italian swimmer Luca Marin.
Credits
: This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the
Wikipedia
article "Laure Manaudou".
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