Swimming: Olympic champion sets world standard

Alexander Popov, who won the 50 metres and 100m freestyle gold medals at the Barcelona Olympics, set a world record of 47.83 seconds in the 100m freestyle event at the short-course World Cup meeting in Hong Kong yesterday. The Russian trimmed 11-hundredths of a second off the mark set by the Brazilian Gustavo Borges on 2 July last year. Nick Gillingham and Mark Foster were British winners in Hong Kong. Gillingham comfortably beat the Russian Andrei Korneyev to win the 200m breaststroke with the Dutch veteran Ron Dekker third. Foster also held off a Russian challenge, narrowly beating Denis Pankratov in the 50m butterfly. About 140 swimmers were participating in the two-day competition at Kowloon Park, the first leg of a seven-meeting 1994 World Cup.