Kyle Chalmers Will Miss Budapest World Championships, Aiming for Commonwealth Games and Paris Olympics
Australian superstar sprinters Emma McKeon and Cate Campbell have already announced they will miss the 2022 World Championships, which will take place in Budapest in June, and now, Australia’s top male swimmer from the past several years has joined that absent list. Kyle Chalmers, who won gold in the 100 freestyle at the 2016 Olympics and then silver in the event at the 2021 Games, told Swimming World that he planned to skip the meet.
Previously, Chalmers withdrew from the Short Course World Championships in Abu Dhabi in December because of shoulder problems. Following surgery, he quickly ramped up his training to prepare for a World Championships scheduled for May in Fukuoka, Japan, but when that meet was postponed to 2023, Chalmers chose to take a short break to allow his body to heal and give his mind a chance to refresh. Then, when the “extraordinary” summer 2022 Worlds were added to the calendar, he decided that skipping that meet would be best for his long-term goals.
“I hadn’t had a break since March 2020, so it was a perfect opportunity for me to have some time out of the pool, get my body right, obviously my shoulders, get my mind right so I can push on and swim really well in Paris,” Chalmers said. “Obviously, World Championships is such a huge thing, and I’m sure they’ll be some amazing performances there, but it just didn’t fit into my preparation and my schedule in my leadup for Paris. I need to do everything in my power to focus on my long-term goal, which is winning in Paris, so it’s all about getting my body right.”
Chalmers added that he did plan to compete in a major international meet this year, and that will be the Commonwealth Games in late July and early August in Birmingham, England. “That’s been also been a main focus of mine for quite some time, so I want to get back and do quite well at that,” he said. At the previous edition of the Commonwealth Games in 2018, Chalmers won five medals, including gold in the 200 free, silver in the 100 free and three relay golds.
At the Tokyo Olympics, Chalmers helped Australia win bronze medals in the 400 and 800 freestyle relays, and in the shorter event, he brought his squad from sixth to third on the anchor leg with a brilliant 46.44 split. However, Chalmers missed defending his 100 free gold by just six hundredths of a second. He matched his lifetime best of 47.08, but Caeleb Dressel barely held on to win gold.
Chalmers followed up that Olympic performance with a brilliant fall short course season as part of the ISL’s London Roar and on the World Cup circuit. Most notably, he took down a 13-year-old world record in the short course meters 100 free when he posted a time of 44.84 at the World Cup stop in Kazan.
Those performances foreshadowed another exciting clash with Dressel in the 100 free this year, but that matchup will likely have to wait until the 2023 Worlds in Fukuoka.
Ironically, the 2022 meet will be the second World Championships in Budapest that Chalmers has missed. Previously, he was forced to withdraw from the 2017 edition of the meet after undergoing heart surgery.