| Serhiy Advena | |
| Fullname: | Serhiy Mykolaiovych Advena |
| Strokes: | Freestyle, butterfly |
| Club: | ZS Kyiv |
| Birth Date: | August 4, 1984 |
| Birth Place: | Kyiv, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union |
| Weight: | 820NaN0 |
| Show-Medals: | yes |
Serhiy Mykolaiovych Advena (Ukrainian: Сергій Миколайович Адвена; born August 4, 1984) is a Ukrainian former swimmer who specializes in the freestyle and butterfly swimming styles.[1] He is a two-time Olympian (2004 and 2008), and a multiple-time Ukrainian record holder in both 100 and 200 m butterfly. He also helped out the Ukrainian team to upset their American rivals and claim the medley relay title (3:38.49) at the 2005 Summer Universiade in Izmir, Turkey.[2]
Advena made his Olympic debut in Athens 2004, competing in two swimming events. He also teamed up with Maksym Kokosha, Dmytro Vereitinov, and Olympic stalwart Serhiy Fesenko in the 4 × 200 m freestyle relay. Swimming the anchor leg, Advena recorded a fastest split of 1:50.90, and the Ukrainian team went to finish the preliminary heats in twelfth overall, with a final time of 7:24.13.[3] In the 200 m butterfly, Advena failed to qualify for the final, as he finished twelfth overall in his semifinal run in 1:58.11. His time was just two hundredths of a second (0.02s) ahead of Japan's Takeshi Matsuda, who beat him for the gold medal at the 2003 Summer Universiade in Daegu, South Korea.[4] [5] [6]
Four years after competing in his first Olympics, Advena qualified for his second Ukrainian team, as a 24-year-old, at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. He finished sixth in the 200 m butterfly from the European Championships in Eindhoven, Netherlands, clearing a FINA A-standard entry time of 1:57.04.[7] On the second day of the Games, Advena challenged seven other swimmers in heat five of the 200 m freestyle, including South Africa's Darian Townsend and Israel's Nimrod Shapira Bar-Or. He cruised to third place by a single tenth margin from Townsend in a Ukrainian record time of 1:48.18, but missed the semifinals by a 0.37-second deficit, as he placed twenty-third overall in the preliminaries.[8] In the 200 m butterfly, Advena posted a time of 1:56.24 to obtain a fourteenth seed on the morning prelims.[9] [10] Then, he repeated his feat from Athens with a fifteenth-place time of 1:56.64 in the semifinals.[11]