Xu Jiayu Breaks the 50m Backstroke World Record Leading Off a Relay in Beijing
Swimming the first leg of a mixed medley relay at China's national short-course championships, Xu Jiayu covered 50 meters in 22.03 seconds, taking down a world record that had stood for barely two weeks.
The most striking thing about Xu Jiayu's world record is that it happened in the middle of a relay, at a domestic meet, as a warm-up act. Swimming the lead-off backstroke leg of a mixed 4x50 medley relay at China's National Short-Course Championships on Saturday night, the 31-year-old covered his 50 meters in 22.03 seconds — six hundredths of a second inside the 22.09 world record South Africa's Pieter Coetze had set at the World Cup stop in Tashkent only two weeks earlier.
Because world swimming rules count lead-off relay legs as record swims, the time stood, and the results screen from the meet shows it plainly: 10.82 to the turn, 22.03 at the finish.
Xu is the most decorated male backstroker China has produced, an Olympic medalist and multiple world champion, and Saturday's session gave him a second piece of history. Earlier in the evening he won the men's 100m backstroke in 48.77 seconds, breaking his own Asian record — a double that World Aquatics' Chinese account marked with an official record poster, and that Chinese swimming fans greeted with the kind of numbers usually reserved for a title fight.
The timing matters for more than trivia. Short-course records fall in bursts when someone times a season right, but Xu's double — a world record and an Asian record in one evening, at 31, four years past the age when most backstroke specialists fade — reads as a statement aimed at next year's long-course world championships and the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, where the American and Australian backstroke fields he has raced for a decade will be younger.
It also lands in a Chinese swimming program that has spent two years under international scrutiny over doping cases, and whose surviving veterans have become the sport's most credible standard-bearers. A 31-year-old setting an outright world record in an event usually owned by twenty-somethings is, whatever else it is, the strongest rebuttal the program could have wished for.
The relay itself, with the record already banked, was almost a formality: Xu's teammates brought the medley home for the title. The next time he swims the distance alone, the field will be chasing 22.03.