Lucas Matzerath is a lank. At first glance, the two-meter tall athlete doesn't look like the typical breaststroke swimmer. “Most of them have a different figure than me,” agrees the 21-year-old. But by focusing on the arms and combining them with a high frequency, he too can move forward quickly with his long, thin body. The SG Frankfurt athlete proved this again at the German championships on Friday in Berlin. He secured his first German championship title in 59.44 seconds. “I'm really happy with the race,” he said afterwards. “I would never have thought to swim two hundredths above my personal best after training. It was just a great race. "Even trainer Mark Jayasundara was amazed:" It's sensational that he can get such a time out of this phase. "he said.

It was not the first exclamation mark that the athlete from the small community of Titz near Düren has set in the past few weeks. As early as December, the Hessian by choice remained below the norm for the Olympic Games in Tokyo for the first time in 59.75 seconds in a squad competition in Würzburg. In the decisive trials four months later in Berlin, he was even able to top this time in 59.63 seconds and can therefore plan for the trip to Japan. In addition, Matzerath improved his personal record over the non-Olympic 50 meters to 27.13 seconds three times in a row at the European Championships in Budapest in May, where he went on his parade route to the semifinals, and achieved the best placement in the German delegation.

"The postponement of the games ensured that I had the opportunity to participate at all," says Matzerath honestly. Last year it would not have been far enough in its development for that. Coach Jayasundara praises his athlete's professionalism in every respect. Whether punctuality, training, relaxation or nutrition - the young man is always very reliable and always tries to get the best out of himself.

The two of them came to the Main from SG Mönchengladbach in 2016. The coach replaced the long-time successful coach Michael Ulmer at the edge of the pool with the first team because he wanted to take it easy. The internationally experienced A-license holder asked Matzerath whether he would accompany him. “I never wanted to move to boarding school,” emphasizes the only child. But even less did he want to lose his trusted supervisor and start again somewhere else with a new man at his side. Accordingly, the newcomer from Frankfurt moved to the house of athletes at the Waldstadion and graduated from the Carl-von-Weinberg-Schule, the elite sports school in the Hessian city. “That was the biggest change for me,” he says.

In North Rhine-Westphalia he had just finished tenth grade as a G8 student and was about to go into twelfth grade here in the G9 system. In the end, he mastered this challenge and graduated with a grade point average of 2.2. Now he is studying electrical engineering at the Rhein-Main University of Applied Sciences in Rüsselsheim. He is currently enjoying a semester of leave there so that he can concentrate fully on sport.

Matzerath had come to this, at least the drawing of lanes in the pool, late. After taking swimming courses with the German Life Saving Society, he had meanwhile followed his best friend to judo. “But I wasn't aggressive enough.” So we went back to the fin competitions together and then at the end of 2011 to the Gladbach starting community. Just a few months later, Jayasundara took over the third team there and began to promote the talent. He ran into open doors with it: The hardworking worker accepted every offer for an extra unit, precisely because it involved intensive technical training. It is precisely in solving a new task on each track, instead of just counting tiles, that the attraction of the 2018 Junior European Championship participant lies in his passion.For him, however, the water is also a place to switch off, where you can “forget your worries”.