It's only 13 miles from Mount Vernon Park to the Watergate Complex, and in the summer of 1972, history was made at both locations. If you don't know what happened at the Watergate on June 17th, 1972, your lack of knowledge of American history is appalling (Google it!).
If you don't know what at MVP that summer, well, that's okay because it's pretty obscure! But, an 8 & under Gator boy by the name of Brad Hucks (he would be around 50-51 years old today) swam the 25 meter backstroke in a team record time of 20.90.
That 43 year old record was edged out on Saturday by 8 & under Gator Matthew Makin, who swam a 20.83 to knock the oldest Gator team mark out of the record books. Mr. Hucks, who I believe from Facebook is living in Port Charlotte, Florida, still holds the oldest MVP record, the 9-10 fly mark set in 1974. Anytime Mr. Hucks had a great Gator year, Richard Nixon has a bad one, as 1974 is, of course, the year Nixon resigned.
Going back to 1972, not only was neither Matthew's dad or mom even born yet, but the year marked the debut of the first successful video game, called Pong, the start of ABBA, the first digital watch was sold (kids, a watch is a clock you wear on your wrist. It doesn't do texting or play music.), the Godfather was released, as was "Watership Down." The Cowboys won the Super Bowl (Tony Romo obviously was NOT their quarterback, and the greatest show ever on TV, MASH, debuted.
Besides Matthew Makin's tour de force, there were three other team records broken on Saturday, although none nearly as old as 43!
Kevin Adams-Mardi set two of them, as he lowered one of his own records and knocked out a seven year old mark. Kevin now has four of the five individual boys 15-18 marks. His 24.28 freestyle swim broke the 24.49 mark of Sean Bourne set back at Divisionals in 2008, and Kevin's 31.02 in the 50 meter breaststroke knocked more than half a second off his old mark of 31.60.
Sean Jansen took out a 12 year old record set in 2003 by Steven Berry. Sean's 13-14 breaststroke swim in 35.43 was over 0.40 seconds better than Steven's 35.85 swim.
In all, 61 years worth of Gator boy records were broken on Saturday. For the season, 15 total team records were set, including ten individual and five relay records. Pretty amazing swimming!
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