“It was just sick – instant relief. It was so great that that I’d done it, that was my last opportunity, and I had put pressure on myself,” Alyssa Tapper says of qualifying.
Both swam their second-fastest times on their World Championships debut, after setting big lifetime best times to qualify.
Both are now hoping to drop times further as they eye their first senior national team together at the Pan Pacific championships to be held in the USA in August.
Swimming New Zealand has set easier “development” standards for the Pan Pacific championships for younger swimmers who are not already Aquablacks and so getting on this team is one short-term goal for both.
Milana Tapper competing at the World Championships.
Should Alyssa Tapper, 18, drop two seconds further at trials for the Pan Pacific Championships to meet that development standard, she may join her sister, now 20, on their first team together, particularly if Swimming New Zealand sends a women’s 4x200m freestyle relay team.
“That would be, like, just absolutely unreal,” Milana Tapper says. “Over the past few years since we became on the radar in New Zealand for swimming, we got this idea of how cool it would be to be on a team together, and this might be that first chance where it will happen. So, it’s really exciting.”
“I want to get as far under that time as I can,” Alyssa Tapper adds. “That’s what I’m working towards, that’s my goal. I definitely feel that it’s possible.”
Held every four years, the Pan Pacific Championships are for nations bordering the Pacific Ocean, and are hosted by the USA, Australia, Japan or Canada. The 2022 event was cancelled because of Covid restrictions. In 2014, the New Zealand team claimed five medals but just two pool swimmers competed in 2018.
Milana Tapper could also compete at this year’s Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, if the New Zealand Olympic Committee considers that a women’s 4x200m freestyle relay team could potentially place top three. Should it do so, it will be the first New Zealand relay to podium since 2010.
The Pan Pacific Championships start 10 days after the Commonwealth Games end, and Swimming New Zealand is considering taking two freestyle relays – the women’s 4x100m freestyle is the other one – and if so, Milana Tapper could be in both at the Pan Pacific Championships, given she is also the national title-holder in the 100m freestyle.
It has been a rapid rise since the sisters moved to live in Australia early in 2024 to improve their swimming. Both are currently coached by Thomas Fraser-Holmes, a World Championship and Pan Pacific Championship gold medallist based at Griffith University on the Gold Coast.
“We were actually training at different programmes at first. I wanted her to join our squad the whole time I had been training here,” Milana Tapper says of her sister. “It’s so good.”
She says it’s “unfortunately not what I would get in New Zealand” as there are four or five of them that swim around one minute 58 seconds in 200m freestyle “so we are all training at the same speed”.
In New Zealand, only Milana Tapper, Erika Fairweather and Lauren Boyle have been quicker.
Next week, Alyssa Tapper will start part-time study at Griffith, studying physiotherapy while also working 10 hours a week in hospitality. Milana Tapper works 25 hours a week as a receptionist for a physiotherapist, while studying a Bachelor of Accountancy through Massey University. It’s a busy life juggling work, study and sport, with the assistance of the bank of mum and dad for swimming costs.
“I don’t know if I do it really well, but I get by. I just know I have a certain amount of time for everything, but pretty much every hour of every day is planned,” Milana Tapper says.
Fraser-Holmes’ swimmers, 11 of whom competed at the 2025 World Championships, push each other to do better. Alyssa Tapper joined her sister’s squad early last year.
“I think we are pretty lucky that we get to do it together, that as the programme that works for us; it’s pretty cool. It’s just good that we have each other, it’s pretty positive, everyone holds each other accountable,” Alyssa Tapper says. “I’ve always got people to chase.”
The Tappers were chasing faster swimmers a lot when younger, but they were considerably slower than their peers then. Before moving to Australia, Milana Tapper had come 100th in an event at the 2019 Division II Championships and had only claimed two silver medals in longer distances at age-group level. Alyssa Tapper had also never won a national age title until she won two last year. In fact, at their last National Age Group championship together, the younger Tapper placed ahead of her sister in the 200m freestyle.
“We both had a slower start to getting good results compared with other people,” Alyssa Tapper says. “It wasn’t until I was about 17 that I started doing well. To have my first junior team and her first senior team [in the same year] was pretty cool.”
It was just two months after moving to Australia in 2024 that Milana Tapper’s sporting career took off. Then 18, she returned to win her first age group national title, qualifying her for the Junior Pan Pacific championships that August where she was finalist.
A few days later, also in Australia, she became a junior world champion at the 2024 Lifesaving World Championships as captain of the Junior Black Fins. Seven months later, she qualified for the World Aquatics Swimming Championships in the 4x200m freestyle relay, and the following month at the 2025 national championships, she met the 200m freestyle World championship standard in a time quicker than every New Zealand 4x200m freestyle relay swimmer has clocked in any pinnacle competition, bar Fairweather.
Milana Tapper also won her first national open title in the 100m freestyle 48 hours before, with Alyssa Tapper lowering her 400m freestyle time in between, having already qualified for the World Junior Championships at the Australian Age Championships the previous month. Milana Tapper made her first senior team – the 2024 World Short Course Championships – but withdrew because of injury. In November 2025, back in New Zealand, Alyssa Tapper got multiple medals competing in the International Surf Rescue Challenge for the Junior Black Fins.
But getting that individual 200m time last year was fortunate for Milana Tapper. Had she not done so, she would not have become an Aquablack because Swimming New Zealand did not end up selecting a 4x200m freestyle relay team for that world championships.
Milana Tapper was disappointed, as Swimming New Zealand preferred to focus on Fairweather’s 800m freestyle event the following day instead of entering the relay, costing her the chance to swim a World Championship final, possibly in New Zealand record time. It was also the first time New Zealand had two individual female qualifiers in the 200m freestyle. Fairweather placed seventh.
“I kind of just accepted that it’s what it was, but that relay swim would have been really cool,” Milana Tapper says.
She is hoping a relay will be selected for the Commonwealth Games; the New Zealand qualifying time for the individual 200m freestyle is the world’s toughest, but the relay standard is more lenient. Just three Commonwealth swimmers went quicker than the selection time at the last World Championships. However, swimmers who do not meet the designated individual standard may be nominated to the New Zealand Olympic Committee for selection, provided they are assessed as top six potential, which Milana Tapper potentially could be.
Alyssa Tapper, now 18, will probably be disappointed if she is not named in the Pan Pacific team, as her next best option would ordinarily have been the 2026 Oceania Championships in May. It’s now a competition that the Tappers cannot both compete at, as this year Swimming New Zealand has decided that swimmers aged 17 and 18 are excluded from selection.
Clearly, the Tapper sisters don’t consider they would be where they are today had they stayed in New Zealand, as their Australian training environment is superior, leading to achieving qualifying standards.
“With the work that I was doing throughout the year I had a strong feeling I was going to get that time,” Milana Tapper says. “But had you asked me two years ago I probably would have said no. I don’t think I would have, had I stayed in New Zealand.”
The ultimate goal of any top swimmer is, of course, an Olympics, and Milana Tapper is hoping that if she keeps on progressing the way she has been, that could become a reality.
“I want to be on an Olympic team as well,” Alyssa Tapper adds. “I wouldn’t be doing this if that’s not what I wanted to do – but even if that doesn’t happen it’s just seeing how far I can go and how I can get the most of what I can do.”
This story was originally published at Newsroom.co.nz and is republished with permission.