Laure Manaudou of France and Germany's Helge Meeuw have pulled out of title defences at the European championships.

Manaudou withdrew from the 800 metres freestyle heats to concentrate on her 100 backstroke title defence, which she began competently earlier in the morning session.

Meeuw, an ailing member of an already severely reduced German team, pulled out of the men's 50 backstroke heats.

Suffering from sinusitis, he had also missed Tuesday's 100 backstroke heats.

Manaudou, who won the 200 backstroke on Wednesday, qualified for Thursday evening's 100 backstroke semi-finals in one minute 00.78 seconds, trailing only the time of 1:00.72 set by Spain's former Russian Nina Zhivanevskaya.

Manaudou, 21, Olympic 400 freestyle champion and world champion at 200 and 400 freestyle, won four events at the 2006 Euros in Budapest.

She took gold in the 400 and 800 freestyle, 100 backstroke and 200 individual medley, adding three bronzes in the 200 freestyle, 4x200 freestyle and 4x100 medley relays.

Manaudou cut back her programme here to catch up with training for the Olympics after being disrupted by having four coaches in less than a year.

She will leave after Friday's 4x200 freestyle relay to get back to preparing for the Beijing Games in August, missing the 200 and 400 freestyle which will be contested on Saturday, Sunday and Monday.

French team mate Hugues Duboscq, who became the fifth swimmer to break the one-minute barrier when he was second in Wednesday's 100 breaststroke, set a championship record in the 200 breaststroke heats.

Duboscq, silver medallist in the 100 in 59.78 behind the 59.76 of Norway's Alexander Dale Oen, led qualifiers for the evening's semi-finals in 2:10.72, well inside the championship record of 2:11.37 set by Italy's Davide Rummolo in Berlin in 2002.

Yana Klochkova, double Olympic champion in 2000 and 2004, qualified comfortably for the 200 individual medley semi-finals after failing to get past the heats in Tuesday's 400 individual medley.

The 25-year-old Ukrainian was third overall behind Camille Muffat of France and Evelyn Verraszto of Hungary.

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Reuters