Sandeno Leaves Her Injury and Olympian Poll Behind

Kaitlin Sandeno said she left the blocks in the 800-meter freestyle race at the seventh Janet Evans Invitational wanting to make a statement.

And she did it by holding off 1996 Olympian Claudia Poll of Costa Rica Thursday at USC McDonald’s Swim Stadium.

Sandeno’s time of 8 minutes 38.66 seconds, 2.04 seconds faster than Poll’s, highlighted the opening day of the four-day meet, which is a warmup to the Olympic trials Sept.9-16 in Indianapolis.

“I’m very happy with the race,” Sandeno said. “My stroke was good. I was working on lengthening it and it looked good. I wanted to come to the race and step it up and show people what I’m made of.”

Sandeno, who won the event a year ago in 8:36:21, had a mild case of tendinitis in her shoulders and took off eight weeks from her training in February to rehabilitate. However, despite the setback, her club co-coach, Vic Rigs, said she’s in better condition now than she was before the injury.

“I am very pleased where we are in our training. Visibly, there is a difference in her swimming,” Riggs said.

Sandeno, 17, a senior-to-be at El Toro High School in Lake Forest, said she initially was concerned about how long it would take her to recover but that she’s no longer feeling any pain.

“After taking that much time off I’m happy to be finally coming back,” she said. “It feels great to be back in shape. Being out that long was frustrating.”

The men’s 800 freestyle was dominated by familiar faces, with South Africa’s Ryk Neethling, who swims for the University of Arizona, also successfully defending his title. He timed 8:06:48 to defeat USC sophomore Erik Vendt (8:08:09).

Vendt led most of the race, but Neethling overtook him in the final 100 meters.

“I swam kind of a stupid race,” Vendt said. “Normally, I like to take it out at even splits. I took it slow today. In order to beat him I should have taken it out faster.”

Vendt upset Neethling at the NCAA championships in the 1,500 freestyle in March, thwarting his bid to win his 10th NCAA title.

“I really like to race against Erik. We had a great race at the NCAAs,” Neethling said.

Neethling set a meet record of 8:01:36 a year ago, but he said he is not in the best shape after spending two weeks in South Africa and flying in Thursday afternoon from Arizona.

“Up until flying to South Africa, I was in the best shape I’ve ever been, but it’s hard to fly that much and train that hard and have it not affect you,” he said.

Preliminaries in the men’s and women’s 100 freestyle, 200 butterfly, 200 backstroke, 400 freestyle and 400 relay will begin at 9 a.m. today, with finals starting at 5 p.m.