World Championships: Pieter Coetze Finally Sets African 50 Back Record
Pieter Coetze’s latest stellar turn at the 2025 World Championships may be his biggest prize yet: The African record in the men’s 50 backstroke.
Gerhard Zandberg’s African record had stood since the super-suited Worlds in 2009 until Coetze finally clipped it Saturday in Singapore by going 24.32 in the semifinals of the 50 back.
That trimmed .02 off the time Zandberg has held for the better part of two decades. It also has Coteze seeded third in Sunday’s final of the 50 back at a meet where he’s already won gold in the 100 and silver in the 200.
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To say he’s been circling this record for a while is an understatement. The 21-year-old from Pretoria broke 25 seconds for the first time in 2022 at 24.74. He’s swum in the 24s nearly 30 times over the years without finding that last third of a second.
He went 24.58 at the World Junior Championships in 2022, 24.36 at South African Senior Championships in 2023 and 24.46 at Worlds in Doha. Surely it had to fall at the World University Games this year, but he went 24.50 and 24.49, nonetheless winning gold in the 50 back and 100 back as well as 100 free gold. Then in prelims, in Singapore, he matched his best time of 24.36, still .02 shy of the mark.
Finally it went down in semifinals. Coetze has a chance to improve it further, which may be necessary if he’s to take a medal from a field led by Neutral Athletes Kliment Kolesnikov (24.16) and Pavel Samusenko (24.31).
Coetze holds African records in the 100 back (51.85) and 200 back (1:53.36), both set at the Paris Olympics and lowered at the World Championships this year. The latter was a 2009 record by George Du Rand that Coteze lowered by two seconds from Paris to Singapore, from 1:55.60 to 1:53.36 with only the briefest of semifinals stops in the 1:54s.
