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Chad Le Clos retains the No1 world ranking in 200m freestyle crown

Chad Le Clos took the No1 world ranking in Durban on Wednesday night as he unleashed a new strategy to outduel former stablemate Myles Brown and retain his national 200m freestyle crown.

Instead of playing it cautious and racing over the second half, Le Clos attacked from the start, similar to what he did while winning the Olympic silver medal in Rio last year.

By the halfway mark he was a body length in front, before Brown, the 2015 champion, hit back in the second hundred, closing the gap slightly but not enough to cause the upset he did two years ago.

Le Clos floated into the wall in 1min 46.84sec, the fastest time in the world so far this year.

“I didn’t want to swim into his race,” said Le Clos, owner of the 1:45.20 national record.

“I knew that Myles was thinking I would go with him and he would burn me on the third lap like he does, so I tried to change it up a bit and shake up the tactics.

“Every year I come here and we all swim slower in the first 100m because we’re all scared to go out, we all want to race the race and try win.

“You can almost feel the tension, it’s like the 100m free. I always feels this is the big race of the week because of me and Myles. You can just feel the tension before that race.”

His new coach, Italian Andrea Di Nino, told him to go out hard, but Le Clos admitted it was hard to execute on home soil.

“I was like ‘look, you’ve got to understand something, I’ve never done that before at nationals because I’m always racing the race’. It’s a different kind of pressure for me.”

Brown, second in 1:47.55, said he was surprised by Le Clos’s advantage, but said he focused on swimming his own race.

Both men were inside the 1:47.73 A-qualifying time for the world championships in Budapest in July.

So far only three men have booked their spots — the third being Cameron van der Burgh — although Swimming SA say they will consider B-qualifying times for swimmers who are young, female or black.

On the night, Mariella Venter, 17, won the 100m backstroke title in a B-qualifier.

Van der Burgh, after an easy 28.28sec in the morning heats, found his rhythm in the 50m breaststroke semifinals, touching in 27.06 to equal his best-ever time at the King’s Park pool and move to second in the world rankings behind British star Adam Peaty.

“The pressure’s off,” said Van der Burgh, who qualified for the world championships in the 100m breaststroke the night before.

“You can experiment, you can play around. I can still make a few errors and still make it, so there’s room to [improve].

“There’s a few things I was trying that I felt were working quite nicely towards the end of the race,” said Van der Burgh, adding he’d like to break 27 seconds in the final on Thursday night.

Le Clos was quickest in the 200m butterfly semifinals, going 2:00.88 with Brown, doing this event for fun, the second-fastest in 2:02.19.

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