14-year-old Grace Khelan has just won her second gold medal for Fiji at the New Zealand Age Group Swimming Championships.<\/p>\n
Khelan won her 100 metres Freestyle women’s heat with a time of 59.57 seconds in Hastings.<\/p>\n
She had earlier won gold in the 50 metres freestyle for her age group.<\/p>\n
Fiji Aquatics\u00a0Performance Coach,\u00a0Sharon Smith says\u00a0Grace has always been a superstar since she was under 12.<\/p>\n
Smith says Grace has been waiting till she turned 14 to experience and gain exposure internationally.<\/p>\n
She says Grace’s first international meet was in Dunedin last month, where she won 3 gold medals, and now in Hastings, she is racing NZ’s top age groupers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Performance Coach says Grace has achieved many qualifying times for next month’s Oceania Championships, which will be held in Suva.\u00a0<\/p>\n
She says Grace’s performance so far in Hastings shows we need more overseas experience and exposure to be able to produce results, as she has broken age-group records as well.<\/p>\n
Smith says that Grace\u00a0is in the top two in a few events in Fiji.<\/p>\n
She adds her Head Coach, Esther Malani, has worked hard to get Grace to where she is and has been very patient with her development and pathway. <\/p>\n
Next up for Grace and her team is hopefully the Junior Pan Pacific and Youth Olympics this year,\u00a0Tahiti next year, as well as the Commonwealth Youth Games.<\/p>\n
Her father, Michael Khelan, says he gives God all the\u00a0glory and honour for his girl.<\/p>\n
He says they are so proud of her as all the hard work and sacrifice is paying off. <\/p>\n
He reminds his daughter to stay humble as this is just the start of God’s great vision for her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"14-year-old Grace Khelan has just won her second gold medal for Fiji at the New Zealand Age Group…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":371234,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[111,139,69,194127,213],"class_list":{"0":"post-371233","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-new-zealand","9":"tag-newzealand","10":"tag-nz","11":"tag-photo-swimming-video-youth","12":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=371233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371233\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/371234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=371233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=371233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=371233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}