Kristof Rasóvszky Wins Out At Home

Courtesy of FINA, Balatonfüred, Hungary.

Hungary’s Kristof Rasóvszky is always in the hunt for a podium position with five career podium finishes in the FINA/CNSG Marathon Swim World Series, but he especially wanted to win in his native Hungary.

His dream turned to gold with a first-ever podium in Balatonfüred for the local hero.

Rasóvszky lives in Veszprem, 20 km from the venue, swims for the Balaton Swimming Club, trains at the lakeside complex and is nicknamed The Balaton  Shark. After coming down to the lake from some high altitude training, doing some 100 km training weeks, and skipping the previous World Series top in Setubal, Portugal last week, he was ready to race.

He took out the race in his favored position – first – and then pulled ahead of the 2016 Olympic gold medalist Ferry Weertman and Germany’s Soren Meissner by comfortable margins: 6.5 seconds ahead of Weertman and 9.8 seconds ahead of Meissner.

He later said of his third podium position in four races of 2019, “Everything went according to my plans, even the other guys helped somewhat.  I swam ahead at the beginning to set the pace and found out the others tried to follow me which was good news since my race tactics were tailored for me and actually no one wanted to challenge this. So when I geared up for the finish no one could come with me.

This [moustache] brought me luck, so I won’t touch it in the remaining weeks [until the FINA World Championships]. No worries [because] it barely grows more than this.

I arrived here in good shape and the work done recently paid off. I swam 100km per week there, so I felt the power today.”

Ferry Weertman could not catch up his friendly rival. “I stuck too long into the pack, to come forward took a bit more energy than usual and once I managed to pass the others, Kristof had already been gone. I tried to have a big finish, I got a bit close to him but this time it was not enough. I’m still fine with this outcome, there is one month to go, we will work hard to be on top for Korea.”

Top 3 Results:

1. Kristof Rasóvszky (HUN) 1:50:12.7
2. Ferry Weertman (NED) 1:50:19.2
3. Soren Meissner (GER) 1:50:22.5