Davies now the man to beat

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FIRST the Ashes were lost, now a Commonwealth Games 1500m swimming gold medal looks certain to find itself on British shores.

Grant Hackett, the world record holder, four-time world champion and two-time Olympic champion in the 1500m freestyle, undergoes minor shoulder surgery in Melbourne this afternoon and will miss March’s Commonwealth Games.

This opens the door for Britain’s Athens Olympic bronze medallist, David Davies, who again finished third behind Hackett at this year’s Montreal world championships.

Davies, from Cardiff, is the world No.3 on the FINA rankings, after his 14min 48.11sec swim in Montreal that put him behind Hackett and American Lars Jensen.

He will swim for Wales at the Melbourne Commonwealth Games and could become his country’s first freestyle gold medallist in 75 years.

Wales has won three Commonwealth golds in swimming in backstroke and breaststroke - the last to Patricia Beavan in 1974.

Hackett, who has not been beaten internationally over the gruelling 30-lap race since taking gold at the 2001 Pan Pacs in Fukuoka, anointed Davies as the man to beat in his absence.

“If he swims around the times he’s been doing for the last couple of seasons, I think he will be pretty well unbeatable,” Hackett said yesterday, after announcing he faces one or two months out of the water because of a suspected minor tear in a tendon in his right shoulder.

On the Australia front, it means a medal chance for Hackett’s training partner Kurtis MacGillivary, ranked No.7 in the world.

The arthroscopic surgery today will pinpoint the exact damage and how long Hackett will have out of the water.

He has swum with the pain since the 2004 Athens Olympics and managed it throughout Montreal 11 months later, where he became the first swimmer to take the 400m, 800m, and 1500m golds at the same world championships.

His 1500m win was a record fourth consecutive world title for the event.

He has the Olympic 1500m golds from Sydney and Athens. In Beijing he could become the first man to win the same individual event at three successive Games. (Two women have done it: Australia’s Dawn Fraser in the 100m freestyle and Hungary’s Krisztina Egerszegi in the 200m backstroke).

It is the desire to have longevity in the sport and the lure of the 2007 World Championships and the 2008 Olympics that have prompted Hackett to fix the problem now and bypass the Commonwealth Games and the 2006 Pan Pacific Games in Vancouver in August. The selection trials for both will be held in January.

“It’s very hard to sacrifice a meet, especially when it’s in your own country and I love competing in the Commonwealth Games,” Hackett said.

He won the 1500m golds at Kuala Lumpur in 1998 and Manchester in 2002.

“But, at the end of the day, you’ve got to look at what’s best for your future career and I’m 100 per cent confident I’ll come back stronger and faster because this will help me exceed my best times.”

Hackett is convinced watching the 1500m final in Melbourne in four months time will make him even more hungry.

“I’ll be watching it to use it as motivation. It’s part of any athlete’s career, an adverse situation, and you can improve yourself or you can feel sorry for yourself and I don’t feel sorry for myself,” he said.

But he is concerned the captaincy of the Australia swim team he was handed last season might be taken away from him.

But Swimming Australia executive director Glenn Tasker laid that to rest.

Tasker said “an interim captain” would be appointed for the Commonwealth Games and Pan Pacs.