Emmanuel Thomas I Sunday, July 16, 2023
FUKUOKA – Germany’s Florian Wellbrock won the gold medal in open water swimming at the World Championships in Japan on Sunday, giving the German team double gold medals.
The 25-year-old won the 10 kilometre race in the southern city of Fukuoka with a time of 1:50:40.3, and celebrated his fifth title at the World Swimming Championships.
With his triumph, Wellbrock made the dream opening weekend perfect for the German open water team after Beck’s victory in the women’s event. Apart from Wellbrock’s win, Germany’s Oliver Klemet, 21, took bronze behind the Hungarian Kristof Rasovszky.
With their successes, Wellbrock, Beck and Klemet have qualified for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. Both Beck and Wellbrock made qualifying for the Olympics as their main goal before the start of the World Championships.
Beck, Klemet, and Wellbrock, who train with long-distance coach Bernd Berkhahn in Magdeburg, west of Berlin, can now approach the coming year much more calmly. They do not have to be in top form for the World Championships in Qatar in February.
On Sunday, Wellbrock was neither deterred by the warm water with an official sea temperature of 25.9 degrees Celsius, nor by the heat with strong sunlight.
Just like in his Olympic open water victory during the last summer Olympics in Tokyo, he coped very well with the difficult conditions.
Wellbrock’s success in his first competition will likely give him further self-confidence for the upcoming races in Fukuoka. A potential repeat to Budapest 2022, when he won five medals in five events, seems possible.
