South Africa’s Pieter Coetze broke the short-course 50m backstroke world record at the World Aquatics World Cup in Tashkent on Friday, stopping the clock at 22.09 seconds.
The 22-year-old sliced 0.02 off the mark Russia’s Kliment Kolesnikov had held since 2022.
From behind at the turn to a record
Coetze turned at the 25-metre wall in 10.92, eight hundredths behind Russia’s Egor Kornev. Kornev had been quickest through the first length in 10.84 — a split faster than Kolesnikov managed on his own record swim in Kazan.
His back-half surge carried him past Kornev, who mis-timed his finish and touched for silver in 22.29, while Kolesnikov faded to sixth place in 22.88.
First global mark for an African standout
The swim marked Coetze’s first world record and made him the only current African to hold one. It also erased Kornev’s week-old World Cup record of 22.23 and came six days after Coetze’s own African benchmark of 22.51 — a drop of nearly half a second in under a week.
“Seeing that time on the board, it didn’t even click that it was a world record,” Coetze told reporters afterwards. “And then, like, a second later, I was like…‘the world record was 22.1.’ So…not many words to describe that. It’s crazy.”
The record caps a campaign in which the two-time Olympian won the 100m backstroke world title in long-course and swept all three backstroke golds at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow this July. The 50m backstroke makes its Olympic debut in Los Angeles in 2028, and before that Coetze heads to the short-course world championships in Beijing in December.
