Fun returns for world record breaker Steffen

BUDAPEST, Aug 3 (Reuters) Britta Steffen, Germany's latest world record breaker, nearly gave up swimming because it had stopped being fun.

Steffen has hurled down a formidable challenge for the next Olympics and dealt two blows to Australian pride, who have dominated women's freestyle sprinting in recent years.

The 22-year-old engineering student has astonished even herself at these European championships.

First she set the fastest-ever relay split in Germany's world record-breaking 4x100 victory and two days later she hurtled to another world mark in swimming's classic event, the 100 freestyle.

Last week Australia held the world relay record they set when they won the Olympic title in Athens in 2004, while Libby Lenton owned the fastest relay split and the world 100 freestyle mark.

Steffen and her German team mates have changed all that in three days, Steffen clocking a spectacular 52.66 seconds relay split and a 53.30 world mark which beat Lenton's 53.42.

Like Lenton, fellow Australian Jodie Henry will have the spectre of Steffen to consider when she defends her 100 freestyle world crown in Melbourne next year and looks ahead to an Olympic title defence in 2008.

JUNIOR PEDIGREE Yet Steffen is no sudden arrival on the swimming scene. Go back to the European junior championships in 1999 and a 15-year-old Steffen bagged the 50, 100 and 200 metres freestyle titles and three relay golds.

The following year she swam at the Sydney Olympics in the 4x200 freestyle relay heats but progress was unspectacular and she was still swimming heats at the 2004 Games in Athens, this time in the 4x100 freestyle relay.

All this was disheartening. ''It simply wasn't any fun anymore,'' Steffen, once a training partner of former world champion Franziska van Almsick, said after yesterday's 100 freestyle triumph.

She took a complete break from competition in 2005 and then had a meeting with her coach Norbert Warnatzsch and a psychologist which led to a new start to her career.

''I have always believed in her talent,'' Warnatzsch said.

That conviction has been born out in Budapest, where a stunned Steffen beamed in disbelief at the electronic scoreboard which displayed her world record time.

Born in Schwedt, in former East Germany, Steffen swims for the SG Neukoelln club in Berlin.

The only German women's 100 freestyle champions -- Kornelia Ender, Barbara Krause and Kristin Otto -- also came from the East but Steffen was just a child when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and signalled the end of the old GDR.

''She is a super talent and is only at the beginning of a great career,'' Oerjan Madsen, the new sports director of the German Swimming Federation, said.

''My goal is to achieve a medal at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing,'' Steffen said. Rivals need no more warning.

Reuters DH GC1824