Kentucky Men Earn First Top-Eight NCAAs Relay Finish Since 2010, Drop Three Seconds In One Season

2026 NCAA DIVISION I MEN’S SWIMMING AND DIVING CHAMPIONSHIPS

• Dates: Wednesday, March 25–Saturday, March 28
• Location: McAuley Aquatic Center, Atlanta, GA
• Defending Champions: Texas (1x)
• SwimSwam Preview Index
• Psych Sheets
• Preview Index
• Live Stream
• Live Results
• Live Recaps:
  • Prelims: Day 1
  • Finals: Day 1

Kentucky men’s swimming walked into the NCAA championships with matching black shirts saying “Disrupt.” on the them. The progress and performance of its 200 medley relay exemplified that.

“The topic of this year is ‘Disrupt is to do,” and that’s why we are wearing these shirts. We are coming not from the bottom but we are not coming from the greatest spot, and we are building the program right now,” said relay butterflyer Javier López Guillen. “What we are doing is disrupt[ing] today.”

The Wildcats’ 200 medley relay relay quartet of Lysander Osman (20.30), Adomas Gatulis (23.23), López (20.56) and Falemana Tuufui (17.91) threw together a time of 1:22.00 to finish eighth overall, becoming the first Kentucky men’s relay to place in the top eight of an NCAA championships since 2010. And the squad lived up to its motto.

Podium views!!! 🤩 pic.twitter.com/YTLWnQVcWR

— Kentucky Swim & Dive (@UKSwimDive) March 25, 2026

Coming into the 2025-26 season, Kentucky’s 200 medley relay program record stood at 1:24.98. That record quickly went down to 1:24.48 at the start of the season during a November dual meet against Louisville, which helped the Wildcats realize they were eventually due for something special. But it wasn’t until the 2026 SEC Championships, when they set their current record of 1:21.80 and placed fourth, that they grasped their full potential to “disrupt” the rest of the NCAA.

“We realized that we can be in between the top schools, being top eight, being on [the] podium,” Gatulis said of what he took from SECs, Kentucky’s first taper meet of the 2025-26 season. “If we put more work on exchanges, more work on mini-details, that could get us there.”

Reaching the territory of an NCAAs night swim required adjustments. All four swimmers are international students from Europe — López is Spanish, Gatulis is Lithuanian, and Osman and Tuufui are French — racing at their first NCAAs, so they bonded over shared European culture and adapting to new American culture. López primarily does aerobic training catered to the 100 and 200 fly, but upon not qualifying for NCAAs individually, he started incorporating more speed-based workouts for the betterment of his 50 fly split.

And while Kentucky’s swimmers carry pride in racing at night and holding trophies on the podium, they aren’t fully satisfied. Despite splitting 17-point as a freshman, Tuufui and his teammates expected that performance out of him .When asked about his anchor, Tuufui (who split 18.16 at SECs and won’t race at NCAAs individually) lamented that his first 25 was “too much” and he “wasn’t glad about it.”

Additionally, the team came into NCAAs with a goal bettering their SECs time, which they were 0.2 off of on Wednesday night.

“We didn’t have the race we want,” López said. “We were training really hard to improve our time from SECs. We are really young, we are underclassmen. We have a lot to improve. These next two years, we have a lot to do.”

Still, Kentucky’s relay, one of three it will swim at this year’s NCAAs, is emblematic of the progress it’s making as a team. While the team has had mid-distance and distance swimmers like Levi Sandidge make waves in recent years, its sprint success is more newfound, and something that the 200 medley quartet credits sprint coach Cauli Bedran for.

The program saw success across the board on Wednesday night. Sandidge and Carson Hick finished third and eighth in the 1650 free, respectively. Those results and the 200 medley relay helped accumulate 49 points for Kentucky — ranking it sixth overall after day one and helping it outscore its 2025 NCAAs total of 30 points. They also bode well for swimmers like Osman and Gatulis, who will both be racing individually later in the meet with Osman projected to score in the 100 back.

The disrupting act has kicked off for the Kentucky men. Now, the swimmers look for the momentum to continue for the rest of the meet, and then years on into the future.

“Right now, Kentucky has the best team energy in the United States,” Osman said. “Every day in practice there’s no days that I don’t laugh, I don’t scream and everybody has a smile on their face, even the coach. And I think that’s great, that’s why we improve.”