Egor Kornev set a men’s 50m butterfly short-course world record on the final night of the World Aquatics Swimming World Cup in Tashkent, stopping the clock at 21.28 and shaving four hundredths off Noe Ponti’s 2024 mark of 21.32.
Lightning out, record back
The Russian tore through the opening 25 metres in a 9.60 split, turning roughly two tenths ahead of Singapore’s Teong Tzen Wei. He came home in 11.68, the fastest closing split in the field, and hit the wall almost seven tenths clear of the field.
Isaac Cooper of Australia and Teong shared second in 21.96. Kornev’s front-half speed outpaced Ponti’s world-record swim, though his closing length was fractionally slower than both the previous record and the World Cup standard it replaced.
Two stops, two records
The swim marks Kornev’s second world-record moment on the Silk Road Tour. One week earlier in Baku he equalled the 100m freestyle short-course record at 44.84, matching Kyle Chalmers’ 2021 time. Across the first two World Cup stops he has now tied one all-time mark and broken another.
Kornev’s 21.28 makes him the only swimmer outside Ponti to feature among the top five all-time performances in the event. The next fastest, Nyls Korstanje, sits at 21.62, the eighth-quickest performance on record.
The Tashkent crowd witnessed a dominant display, but Kornev kept a measured tone afterwards. “I don’t know how much faster I can be,” he told reporters. “Today I gave everything I could.”
The final stop in Astana, starting 15 October, now carries the weight of a tight title race.
