By Braden Keith on SwimSwam
Dutch Olympic swimmers Caspar Corbeau and Tes Schouten are moving to Antwerp, Belgium to train under coach Mark Faber. Faber, 51, left his role as the head of the High Performance Center in Amsterdam late last year to become the technical director of the Flemish Swimming Federation in his native country.
The swimmers each won Olympic bronze medals in the 200 meter breaststroke last summer in Paris while training primarily under Faber. The federation hoped that the top swimmers from Amsterdam would move to the training center in Eindhoven, but without a dedicated breaststroke coach, Corbeau and Schouten opted for Belgium instead.
Post Olympics, the 24-year-old Corbeau raced at the World Cups and the Short Course World Championships before heading back to the United States, where he was born and raised. There he completed his final season of eligibility for Indiana University after spending his first four at the University of Texas. Indiana and head coach Ray Looze have been America’s best breaststroke program consistently over the last decade.
In spite of the coaching change, Corbeau’s results at the AP Race London International in late May were positive, swimming 2:08.21 in the 200 breaststroke. That’s just three-tenths shy of his best time of 2:07.90 at the Paris Olympics that won him the Olympic medal.
He also swam 59.06 in the 100 breaststroke at that meet, which was only .02 seconds shy of his lifetime best.
Corbeau is scheduled to swim the 50, 100, and 200 meter breaststroke events individually for the Netherlands from July 27 to August 3 in Singapore. He will move to Belgium and resume training with Faber at the end of August. He has been training with Kees Robbertsen, who runs the Junior National Training Center in Amsterdam and is also the primary coach for one of the country’s top young sprint prospects and Olympic relay gold medalist Milou van Wijk.
Schouten, meanwhile, has had a rockier post-Olympic journey. She spent time in the hospital resulting from nerve pain and loss of power and function in the entire left side of her body that made it hard for her to eat, talk, and walk.
Unlike Corbeau, she will not compete at the 2025 World Championships for the Netherlands and has not formally raced since the Olympic Games.
Schouten, also 24, will now return to her coach of eight years in Belgium, telling De Telegraaf that she “(doesn’t) want to work with anyone else but Mark.
“This feels like a new start, but at the same time very familiar.”
Others from Faber’s old group in Amsterdam include Arno Kamminga, who is training in Hong Kong with Tom Rushton, and Kenzo Simons, who made the move to Eindhoven to train with Patrick Pearson and Peter Bishop at the High Performance Center there.
Read the full story on SwimSwam: Olympic Medalists Caspar Corbeau, Tes Schouten Will Rejoin Mark Faber in Belgium
