Noè Ponti is off to a perfect start at the European Short Course Championships in Lublin, Poland. The man from Ticino qualified for the final on Wednesday evening with the best semi-final time in the 50 m dolphin.
02.12.2025, 13:11
02.12.2025, 20:58
SDA
Ponti needed 21.51 seconds for the two lane lengths in the semi-final - the defending champion had already been the fastest in the preliminary heat with 21.86 seconds. With his time in the evening, the 24-year-old was just 19 hundredths off his world record. The Frenchman Maxime Grousset, the second best in the semi-finals, clocked 21.96 seconds.
Grousset won the gold medal in both the 50 m and 100 m dolphin ahead of Ponti at the long course world championships in Singapore last summer. Now there is a good chance that the Swiss will return the favor. "I'm happy, it was a good race," said Ponti. Before the 50 m dolphin final, he will compete in the preliminary heat of the 100 m medley in the morning. "I will try to save as much energy as possible."
For Gaia Rasmussen and Flavio Bucca, the semi-finals in the 200 m backstroke were, as expected, too high a hurdle. Both finished in 12th place. A top 8 ranking would have been necessary to reach the final.
The first gold medals in Lublin in an individual discipline were secured by Isabel Gose from Germany and Jack McMillan from Great Britain in the 400 m crawl. Gose's time of 3:54.33 minutes improved the European record set by Spain's Mireia Belmonte in 2013 by 19 hundredths.
