High hopes for young stars

In the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, the “red” swimming had its greatest representation ever, with five swimmers, coached by Shintaro Yokochi.

There were great expectations for Alexandre Yokochi. However, the best Portuguese swimmer showed little confidence, due to an injury he had suffered the year before, and because the competition level was higher with the participation of the Soviets. In the preliminaries of the 200m breaststroke, the swimmer beat the national record, but only managed to qualify for the B final. This event was hard-fought, the Benfica swimmer started too slow but recovered throughout the 200m finishing in 1st place.

At the age of 19 Sandra Neves became the first Portuguese woman to participate in the Olympic Games’ swimming competition. Her qualification was “a great reward for the work done over all these years. A work in which I have always put my heart and soul having around six hours of intensive training every day”. In the qualifying round she set a new national record in the 100m butterfly, with 01min04.60s, twelve hundredths of seconds less than the record that already belonged to her, achieving the 3rd place in the heat and the 27th place overall. She also competed in the 200m butterfly, finishing in 18th place.