Dripping wet from his fastest 100m freestyle, Kyle Chalmers makes a stunning admission: he doesn't feel entirely world-class just yet.
The 20-year-old clocked 47.48 seconds in his pet event at the Australian titles in Adelaide on Monday night.
The time was 0.10 seconds quicker than his previous quickest, his gold-medal swim at the 2016 Olympics.
Chalmers now has the two fastest 100m freestyle times in the world this year – and he's nowhere near peak fitness.
"My skills are still things that are lacking," Chalmers said moments after his 100m freestyle personal best.
"And I know if I can drop those 0.1 of a second, everything adds up."
It's those fractions of seconds that Chalmers now obsesses over.
"I know that my skills are coming, it's just about practising it every time I do a turn in training," he said.
"We do hundreds of them a day. And you can practise bad skills pretty easily with the amount we do.
"So it's practising those right things and your muscle memory coming into a race – you don't want to be thinking about it too much, you just want it to happen naturally."
Chalmers woke up on Monday feeling a tad flat – the night before, he'd won the national title in a 100m butterfly event he entered just for fun.
So he went for a gentle swim.
"I felt lethargic and heavy in the water," he said.
So Chalmers, in his words, "did everything I could to get myself swimming fast".
Massages. A prolonged stretching routine. And then "a very extended warm-up" of swimming about 2.5 kilometres.
All this comes as Chalmers, instead of tapering for the nationals, trains right through them.
"There's not many things that I want to change," he said.
"But there's probably those few things that are going to come with taper and swimming that bit faster in training."
AAP
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