This year’s World Cup series starts tomorrow. Katinka Hosszú, as she admitted in her social media, has awesome memories and feelings about Kazan, venue of the first race, since she broke her first long course world record here in the world championships 2015 in 200 IM.
The three-time Olympic champion will compete in all 7 legs of the World Cup series, certainly in Budapest, too, but before the Hungarian event to be held in October there are three stops. The first adventure in Kazan started with some excitement.
‘On Tuesday evening when we arrived at the hotel and wanted to have dinner, we were informed by the staff that they were out of meat, others ate all’ started Árpád Petrov, Katinka’s and Iron Swim club’s head coach. ‘They told us that they could not supply it. A swimmer without meat? We were almost fighting for our lives. Fortunately, the president of the Russian Swimming Federation was having dinner there and he could manage to solve the problem, so finally we got proper dinner. By the way, Kazan is a very nice and interesting city, it mixes three eras, the Russian Empire, the Soviet and the modern era. It is a marvelous mixture, I would lovely spend some time here. We have a volunteer who is with us all day and arranges everything for us. She is a great help, because I do not think we can get along with my Russian knowledge. As of work, yesterday we had two trainings in the morning and in the afternoon, but today we had only some warm-up and we discussed the strategy of the upcoming three days.’
According to the entry list Katinka will have 11 events, but certainly it may change during the competition. We have nothing else to do, just support her. Go Katka!