British Gas Masters & Senior Age Group Championships

Reading's Masters squad coached by Chris Pearce are regular visitors to the medals rostrum at major championships, the pinnacle being top breaststroker Katie Henderson's world record swim in Spain early in the season.

Although no slouches, the relay squads have taken a back seat to the ranking swims in recent years by the likes of Henderson, Karl Buchholtz and Carole Eyles. Until last weekend, that is.

A small group of swimmers made their way north to Glasgow for the GB long course championships at Tollcross, the training base for Reading’s Olympic swimmer Becky Cooke in the later stages of her career. It turned into a weekend to remember.

Masters relay teams are based on age groups, in a novel way – the aggregate ages must be inside the set limit. Reading’s men’s team of Paralympic world record relay freestyler Graham Edmunds, Buchholtz, Iain Gerrard and middle distance specialist Dave Stannard looked strong on paper and went into the meet with high hopes.

First up on the Friday evening was the 4x200 freestyle relay. Reading got off to a strong start, were never headed and comfortably won their age group. More excitingly, the team set a British record time which was also close to the world record.

There was some confusion on this, with British Swimming officials claiming Reading had broken the world record too but their info proved to be out of date – a subsequent internet search showed it was close, but no cigar.

Revved up by the first swim, the team was looking forwards to Saturday’s 4x100. This one looked a lot tougher. The team from Glasgow in the next lane had the same entry time, as well the obvious advantage of bigger support and familiar surroundings.

Edmunds took the first leg and stormed into a lead. Gerrard (who had already swum an individual 200 free and 200 IM that day) swam brilliantly to hold off a strong challenge and at halfway it was neck and neck. Stannard gave it everything on the third leg, got a small lead and then it was down to Buchholtz to bring it home.

A fine 56-second leg brought the gold medal by over two seconds. More importantly it also broke the world record, previously held by a Brazilian team, by six seconds. And no confusion this time!

“England may be rubbish at football but there's one sport where we can beat Brazil, it was a really memorable moment,” was Stannard’s assessment. (With due credit to Buchholtz’s South African background and Edmunds’s Swansea training base, of course.)

After this, Reading had three mixed relay entries in the 4x50 free, 4x100 medley and 4x200 free, and the team of Edmunds, Buchholtz, Katie Henderson and Helen Whittle took the silver medal in all three.

One final nice surprise, however, was that the winning 4x200 relay team included a Canadian, so while they posted a new world record, Reading still set a new European record.

Whittle, incidentally, enjoys a dual swimming career and is one of Britain’s most highly rated younger meet referees and a racing certainty to officiate at London 2012.

Besides the relays, Reading also came home with eight golds, four silvers and three bronze in the individual programme – Gerrard (silver in his 800 and 1500 free); Henderson (50, 100 and 200 breaststroke gold and 200 IM silver); Edmunds (gold 50, 200 and 400 free and bronze 100 free); Buchholtz (gold 50 and 100 free and bronze 50 back; and Stannard (silver 200 free and bronze 800 free).

By Dave Stannard and Phil Tanner