National swimmer, Dylan Carter and his Team Elite Aquatics teammates will be hoping to see some marked improvements on their times from their recent training camp when the 2021 TYR Pro Swim Series hosted by the USA Swimming starts on Thursday.
The four-day Long Course Meet takes place at the Marguerite Aquatics Center, Mission Viejo, California and will conclude on Sunday and is the first for Carter since his return to the USA last week after his second European training camp at the state-of-the-art facility in Tenerife, Spain along with the Israel Olympic swimming which began in mid-March.
As part of the major meets ahead of the Olympic Games, the organisers will be using “flipped” sessions (evening prelims and morning finals) to mimic the Tokyo Olympic Schedule.
The 2020 First Citizen Sports Foundation “Sportsman of the Year” award to add to his T&T Olympic Committee accolade he collected last December, Carter will compete in three events, the men’s 100 metres butterfly, 50 metres freestyle and 100 metres freestyle.
First up today (Thursday), will be the 100 butterfly for which the USA-based former University of Southern California swimmer is seeded 14th from a field of 33 entrants with a time of 52.64 seconds.
It will not be an easy start for the first-ever T&T Commonwealth Games swimming medallist as the event is expected to feature current World and US record-holder Caeleb Dressel (49.50 secs) as well as Tom Shields, Condorelli Santo, Ryan Murphy, Zheng Quah and controversial Olympic medalist Ryan Lochte.
Carter will have tomorrow (Friday) off from competition before he returns to the pool on Saturday for the 50m freestyle as the 13th seed (22.44) in the field of 37 with Dressel, Bruno Fratas, Michael Andrews, Nathan Adrian, Condorelli and Michael Chadwick all listed to face the starter in the heats as well.
And on Sunday, Carter will wind up his schedule by competing in the 46-man field 100m freestyle as the fifth-seeded swimmer with a time of 48.52 alongside Dressel, Zach Apple, Dean Farris, Adrian, Condorelli, Chadwick and Fratas.
Earlier this year in February. Carter competed at the three-day 2012 Federation France Swimming International FFN Camille Muffat Golden Tour Meeting De Nice.
He was fifth in the 50 metres freestyle A-final in seconds, 22.95 a big improvement on his preliminary heats time of 23.13.
His top performance over the three days came when he earned a silver medal in the men’s 50 metres butterfly in 24.07 seconds to trail Maxime Grousset who won in 23.38 while Sergei Comte took bronze in 24.17.
In the 0m butterfly preliminaries, Carter won the fifth and final heat in 24.13 seconds.
Carter also mounted a challenge for a podium finish in the 100m backstroke but ended in fifth in his semifinal in 55.94 seconds for the ninth spot to miss the final by .02 hundredths of a second behind Greece’s Evangelos Makrygiannis (55.92).
He was also in the 50m backstroke in 25.76 after he clocked 25.72 in the heats, and seventh in the 100m freestyle in 50.14 seconds, after he clocked 49.89 in the heats.