Danielle_Villars
Danielle Villars
Swiss swimmer
Danielle Villars (born 6 March 1993) is a Swiss swimmer who specialized in freestyle and butterfly events.[1][2] She has won multiple Swiss titles and currently holds four national records in both freestyle and butterfly (100 and 200 m). Villars is a resident athlete for the Limmat Sharks, and is coached and trained by Dirk Reinicke.[1]
Villars made her international debut at the 2010 Summer Youth Olympics in Singapore, where she rounded out the finale to eighth place in the 100 (57.72) and 200 m freestyle (2:04.89).[3][4]
At the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, Villars maintained her program by qualifying for two swimming events. She posted FINA B-standard entry times of 59.57 (100 m butterfly) from the European Championships in Debrecen, Hungary, and 2:01.47 (200 m freestyle) from the Olympic trials in Zurich.[5][6][7] In the 100 m butterfly, Villars broke her own Swiss record of 59.42 to share a top seed in the second heat and a twenty-sixth-place tie with Spain's Judit Ignacio Sorribes on the first day of the Games.[8] In the 200 m freestyle, Villars raced to second place on the first heat by 1.06 seconds behind Thailand's Natthanan Junkrajang, outside her personal best of 2:03.55. Villars failed to advance into the semifinals, as she placed thirty-first overall in the preliminaries.[9]
Shortly after her first Olympics, Villars attended Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, where she was a biology major, and trained as a varsity swimmer for the SMU Mustangs.
