yesterday and put on a T-shirt bearing the legend: The Body Achieves What the Mind Believes.

Sadly for the 19-year-old Bermudian swimmer, on this occasion, while the mind may have been positive, the body was just an instant behind.

Despite a courageous swim which put her only a second or so adrift of Trinidadian friend and idol Siobhan Cropper, Williams missed out on Commonwealth Games qualification by the tiniest of fractions.

Williams, who only a day ago had disclosed her desperation to be part of the team to represent the Island in Malaysia, recorded a time of 28:46 seconds, 30 hundredths of a second outside the mark she was aiming for.

Immediately after finishing she turned to look at the time board at the far end of the pool, which was already displaying the bad news.

There was no discernible emotion on her face, but inside she must have been crushed, as five years of work ended in despair.

"It was a hell of a swim,'' said team coach Dawna Ferguson afterwards. "I thought at one stage she'd got it.'' Williams, managing a brave smile despite her agony, agreed it was a great swim, but added: "But it wasn't what I wanted.

"I'm disappointed, but there's not a lot I can do about it now.'' In truth, to qualify for Kuala Lumpur she would have had to swim the event -- admittedly her best -- faster than she had done before in a 50 metre pool.

She came close to it in Barbados recently, recording 28:32. She has achieved a 27:04 in the shorter pools of Bermuda, but that can distort times by as much as two seconds.

"I thought it was pretty fast and it felt fast,'' she said of her heat. "But in general the heats were really slow. Siobhan Cropper was the fastest in 27.03 but usually you'd expect her to do nearer 26.'' Minutes earlier, Craig Roberts had signed off his largely disappointing Games in the 200m individual medley.

There was to be no repeat of his good performance of the previous day when he went close to a personal best in the 50m freestyle with a time of 26.06, a heat in which Ricky Busquets of Puerto Rico had set a new CAC Games record.

He was a couple of metres off the pace after the first 50 metres, the butterfly, and that gap grew to leave him trailing his closest competitor by a full ten seconds at the finish.

Later on Thursday evening Busquets, who has swum regularly in Bermuda, completed a remarkable day for him by taking gold and in the process breaking the record for the second time in a matter of hours.

He bettered his heat time of 22.73 by eighteen hundredths of a second to leave the new record standing at 22.55.

SWIMMING SW