Fourth Place Finish For UL Swimmer In Budapest

Sports - Other Sports

Friday, 13 August 2010 12:06

Written by Stephen Davis

UL based Irish swimmer Grainne Murphy's 800m freestyle swim at the European Swimming Championships in Budapest this week will go down in Irish swimming history.

The 17-year old girl from Ballinaboola, Co. Wexford, who relocated to Limerick to train as part at Swim Ireland's High Performance Centre at UL, finished 16 lengths of the pool in a world class time of 8.25.04 - an agonising five hundredths of a second shy of winning the bronze medal for Ireland.

But, her fourth place swim nevertheless re-writes the Irish record books and indeed lowers the Irish Senior record again, by almost 4 seconds - making it a whopping 11 second improvement that the young swimmer has made to her personal best time and to the Irish Senior record since she arrived in Budapest. Murphy is also Ireland's only finalist at a European Long Course Swimming Championships in the last ten years.

Speaking after the race, the sixth year Castletroy College student who phenomenally split personal best times for the 200 metres and 400 metres freestyle during her 800m final said "It went so well from the start, I just kept my head down and kept going. Obviously I could see Pellegrini coming up behind me - I didn't look at her on the last 50m but she snuck in there, and that's the way it goes."

"I'm not disappointed; it was just an amazing swim. 4th place at a European Championships - my first major competition, it hasn't really sunk in yet," added the joyful teenager