2025 World Champs Preview: Qin Will Rebound in 100 Breast After Disappointing Olympic Results

2025 World Championships

• July 27 – August 3, 2025 (pool swimming)
• Singapore, Singapore
• World Aquatics Championships Arena
• LCM (50m)
• Meet Central
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Men’s 100 Breast– By the Numbers

• World Record: 56.88 – Adam Peaty, Great Britain (2019)
• World Junior Record: 59.01 – Nicolo Martinenghi, Italy (2017)
• World Championships Record: 56.88 – Adam Peaty, Great Britain (2019)
• 2024 Olympic Champion: 59.03 – Nicolo Martinenghi, Italy

Returning 2024 Olympic Finalists

• Gold – Nicolo Martinenghi (ITA), 4th – Melvin Imoudu, Germany, 5th – Lucas Matzerath, Germany – 59.30, 7th – Qin Haiyang, China, 8th – Caspar Corbeau, Netherlands

2024-2025 World Top 10

Nicolo Martinenghi
2025 City of Livorno Meeting
credit Andrea Masini/Deepblumedia
(with permission https://www.federnuoto.it/home/nuoto/news-nuoto/41618-meeting-di-livorno-report-sessione-d-apertura.html)

After years of being spoiled by 56s and 57s from the likes of Adam Peaty, Qin Haiyang, and Arno Kamminga, the Paris 2024 Olympic Games were a huge regression in the men’s 100 breaststroke.

While there were few races that, by time, lived up to expectations in La Defense Arena, the winning times in this 100 breaststroke were especially jarring. Italian Nicolo Martinenghi won in 59.03

Whether it was the pool depth, the pressure, the COVID, the travel, or a simple regression to the mean after years of outliers, the results in Paris are hard to use as any kind of a true indicator of what to expect in 2025.

2024’s fastest swimmer year-long was the 2023 World Champion: Qin Haiyang of China. Now 26, Qin became the first man to sweep the 50-100-200 breaststrokes in 2023 at the World Championships.

He struggled in Paris, though, even by Paris’ standards. He was just 7th in the 100 breaststroke in 59.50, in spite of a 58.93 in the semis and a 57.69 earlier in the year. He also missed the final altogether in the 200 breaststroke. A recovery to split 57.98 in the men’s 400 medley relay at the end of the session indicated that his individual performances were more akin to ‘bad swims’ than a ‘structural decline’.

In the absence of Peaty, Kamminga, and American Nic Fink from the race, I think it’s clear that Qin retakes the mantle as favorite in this race in 2025. He is the world leader this year with a 58.61 from May, and one of only three men who have gone 58.

On paper, the closest to him historically is the Olympic champion Martinenghi, who has been 58.23. Writing his bio is a bit of a mind-bender, because while his times are in the midst of a three-year slide (his best in 2025 is just 59.16), he is the Olympic Champion.

It’s easy to pick Martinenghi for a medal given his consistent ability to get on the podium no matter where the times fall. He was the World Championship silver medalist in both 2024 and 2023 and won in 2022.

But what’s hard is whether to pick him to win this year. While the temptation is there as the Olympic Champion, the smart money rides Qin’s 2024 performance as an anomaly.

Note that Qin has by far the shortest geographic adjustment to make among the top contenders, for whatever impact that has (it seemed to in Paris).

Martinenghi did turn up with a bandaged hand in June, but he says that it was just a protective measure and not the result of an injury.

Is Germany a Breaststroke Country?

With many of the aforementioned big names in the breaststrokes sitting out (and/or ageing out), there is a huge opening this year for some new blood to stake their claim.

Paris saw a riveting finish, with the top four touching within a tenth of a second of each other (the race was slow, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t thrilling). What was missed in the churn was that Germany had the 4th and 5th place finishers in that swim in Melvin Imoudu and Lucas Matzerath.

Germany stakes claim to a lot of things in its swimming history, but it has been a long time since anyone would mistake the country as a “breaststroking power.” In fact, the last time German men won any 100 breaststroke medals at the World Championships was the third edition in 1978 where Walter Kusch won gold and Gerald Morken won bronze for West Germany.

The women had substantially more success in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, but since 1991 they too have had only one World Championship medalist in the 100 breaststroke (Anna Elendt, silver, in 2022).

Perhaps history is repeating itself, though, and with another 1-2 punch, the Germans could make something special happen.

Imoudu is 26 and Matzerath is 25, putting them right in the same age range as the other top contenders mentioned above.

Both swimmers have been 58s. Matzerath’s best time, the German Record, was a 58.74 that he swam at the 2023 World Championships (where he swam all three 58-second swims of his career). A 59.19 in Berlin in May, faster than he was in all of 2024, shows that he has carried his form forward in the post-Olympic year.

Imoudu, meanwhile, has been under 59 seconds just once: at the 2024 pre-Olympic European Championships in Belgrade. He hasn’t been as sharp as Matzerarth this year, marking just a 59.50 at the same German Championship in early May.

In Need of Some Youth

Campbell McKean (photo: Jack Spitser)

Most of the returning contenders from last season are 25-or-older, and this event was badly in need of a spark of youth heading into the new quad.

It got just that at National Trials meets around the world in the spring, chiefly from American Campbell McKean.

The 4th seed, McKean swam 58.96 to win at US Trials in an event where the Americans really looked nervous heading into the meet. That made him the youngest swimmer ever to go under 59 seconds, and while he’s too old for a World Junior Record, the one race leap from 1:00 to 58 (he has still never been 59 seconds) is encouraging for the American future in the event.

He’ll leave his youth training ground in Oregon next season to train with Bob Bowman at the University of Texas, the hottest training program on earth right now, as he builds toward the Los Angeles Olympics. While his swim was certainly a long-term relief for the Americans, there are short term questions about whether he can repeat the swim after such a huge drop at the World Championships.

The almost two months between Trials and the big meet is a bigger gap than normal for the Americans, though, so maybe his coach Jim Nickell and the US staff can find a way to get him back there.

Last year’s teenage breakout was Dong Zhihao of China, though his breakthrough was in the 200 meter race. He won the 200 at the World Championships in 2:07.94 against a pretty decent field in a relatively-soft meet: he beat out Olympic bronze medalist Caspar Corbeau and American Nic Fink for that win.

His 100 lagged a little behind, though – a usual pattern for breaststrokers who tend to develop a 200 before a 100. He swam 59.67 at the 2024 Chinese National Swimming Championships and focused on just the 200 at the Olympics, finishing 4th.

Post-Olympics, though, he made big strides in the sprints. First he went 57.21 at the Chinese Short Course Championships in September, then he swam 59.06 at the 2025 Chinese National Championships and World Championship Trials. That secured his spot in the 100 and 200 (but not the 50) for the World Championships.

Among the other young newcomers in this races is Italy’s Ludovico Blu Art Viberti.

Viberti was a Paris Olympian, where he missed the final in the 100 breaststroke. He won a medley relay medal at the Short Course World Championships with no Martinenghi on the roster.

At 23, he’s a bit older than the other guys in this section, but he’s another swimmer who is rising into the 2025 season. He swam 59.04 in April and 59.06 in June, his two best times by a couple of tenths, and is the current world leader in the 50 breaststroke.

Because of the Italian depth in the breaststrokes, he won’t swim the 50 at this meet, but that pressure seems to be pushing him forward in the 100.

They Grew Up In an Indiana Town

Netherlands’ Caspar Corbeau won an Olympic medal in the 200 breaststroke last year. While his 59.04 in prelims of the 100 breaststroke could have won gold in the final, he added in each round (59.04 – 59.24 – 59.98) and ultimately placed 8th, succumbing to whatever it is that bit everyone else in that final as well.

He’s gone through some coaching changes since then, including spending the spring semester at America’s recent best breaststroke program at Indiana University. He plans to head back to his old coach Mark Faber in Belgium at the end of August, but for the American born-and-raised Corbeau, the changes of scenery haven’t changed his progress.

Now 24, he swam 59.06 at the AP Race International in London in May, which is just .02 seconds shy of his personal best. Among those he beat at that meet was Matzerath, previously mentioned.

He has been right on his personal best in the 200 as well, showing fine form for Singapore.

Among his training partners at Indiana was Josh Matheny, who was the heir apparent to the American breaststroke throne before McKean’s breakthrough swim.

But the 58-second performance by the teenager overshadowed Matheny’s best time of 59.18 that ranks him 9th in the world this year. He’s turned out to be a much better long course breaststroker than short course breaststroker so far – he was only 10th at the NCAA Championships.

Matheny is only 22, and so American sprint breaststroking suddenly looks bright.

Other Names to Watch

• Denis Petrashov, who trains in the US at the University of Louisville, quietly swam a best time of 59.23 in the 100 breaststroke at the Pro Swim Series meet in Fort Lauderdale. The son of a three-time Olympian, he’s got pedigree, and is right in that 25-years-old age where swimmers seem to be peaking in this event lately.
• Ilya Shymanovich, competing as a neutral athlete, has one of the fastest best times in the field at 58.29 – but that was done in 2019. Until about 2023, he was pretty much automatic for 58s, and he was a World Record holder in short course meters, but at 30 years old, it appears his best times are behind him. Still, he swam 59.25 at the Olympics and has been 59.34 this year. That’s close to being a finals time.
• Russian Kirill Prigoda, another neutral athlete, finished 2nd in all three breaststrokes at the World Short Course Championships, including a new lifetime best in this 100 after seven years of stagnation. At 29, he’s at the tail end of his peak too, but has been 59.40 this year in long course.

SwimSwam’s Picks

For me, picking this race is basically two separate things: choosing Qin vs. Martinenghi for win, and then unsorting the logjam for the 3rd-8th place positions, which have about 13 different contenders for them.

I think the most controversial thing in the table below is probably leaving the young American McKean out of the final, but that’s more a reflection of believing he went all-in and had his best shot of the season at Trials than any doubts about his future contributions. We’ve seen that before with young American phenoms (like Thomas Heilman in 2023), and in a tight field, it doesn’t take much to slip out of the final.

I also have Matzerath as the better of the two Germans, though Imoudu’s recent best times have been better. Notwithstanding the Olympics, Matzerath has generally hit his taper a little better for the right meet, so I think that’s the margin between them here.

With such tight swims, though, there are a lot of other names who could creep not only into the top 8, but onto the podium in this race with a slide of just a tenth or two in either direction. This is a race where it’s more important than most to go full-speed in the semifinals in order to earn the right to fight another day.

Darkhorse: Taku Taniguchi, Japan – The front-half of Japan’s medley relay, Riku Matsuyama and Taku Taniguchi, were born three days apart in 2001. Recent results indicate that Japan may have cracked the code on their breaststrokers peaking too young. Taniguchi was just 19th at the Olympics in the 100 breaststroke in 1:00.20, failing to get out of prelims. A 59.30 at the Japanese National Swimming Championships this year, though, was his first time under 1 minute in this event. He is Japan’s only entry in this event.