Spaniard Carles Coll pays off with his explosive performance and finishes seventh in the 200 breaststroke final.

Spanish swimmer Carles Coll, who was crowned short-course world champion last December, was unable to return to the podium after finishing seventh in the 200m breaststroke final at the World Championships in Singapore on Friday. A result that seemed like it could have been completely different when, at the halfway point, he was not only in first place, but also 4 hundredths of a second off the world record, with a time of 1:00.68 minutes.

Almost six-tenths of a second less than his time in the semifinals, in which the 23-year-old from Tarragona shattered Melquiades Álvarez's legendary Spanish record, which had stood since 2009 , after completing the race with a time of 2:08.49. Coll, who studies and trains in the United States under the direction of Spaniard Sergi López at Virginia Tech University, felt a hellish pace in the second part of the race. This was reflected in the 33.72 seconds the Spaniard took to complete the third of the lengths, which relegated the Spanish swimmer from first to sixth place.

But Coll's suffering wasn't over yet. He finally gave up in the final 50 meters, condemning the Catalan to touch the wall in last place with a time of 2:09.44 minutes. An eighth-place finish eventually became a seventh after the disqualification of Russian Alexander Zhigalov. The result couldn't overshadow the more than remarkable performance of the Tarragona native, who, despite his final collapse, posted his second-best ever time with a time of 2:09.44 minutes after touching the wall.

A time insufficient to fight for a podium finish, which Coll was 1.77 seconds away from, and which was closed by a star of the specialty such as the Dutchman Caspar Corbeau, silver in the World Championships held last year in Doha and bronze in the Paris Olympic Games , with a time of 2:07.73 minutes.

The Tarragona native was further behind China's Haiyang Qin, who regained the world championship title he had already won in 2023 in Fukuoka with a time of 2:07.41. Rounding out the podium was Japan's Ippei Watanabe, who had been the best in the semifinals and who won the silver medal with a time of 2:07.70 minutes, 29 hundredths of a second faster than the Chinese swimmer.