Baku, the 25-Metre Pool, and the Breathing of Numbers

2:17 a.m., Da Nang time. I sit before the screen, headphones in, beside me a notebook with a worn spine that I have carried for eight years. Its first page holds a line scribbled in July 2026: "Hazard, not Ha-zan." That note reminds me that a person's name, if called wrong, can warp an entire match. But tonight, the name I must read correctly is not a player. It is an event: the 100 IM. In a World Cup finals session. In Baku. At the Olympics, the 100 IM does not exist. At the long-course World Championships, it has no place either. The 100 IM lives only in the 25-metre short-course pool — where each lap is half the familiar distance, where turn counts double, where every hundredth of a second is decided by a push off the wall. Its presence in Baku is a trace. Like a footprint on sand before the tide erases it. It whispers to me: this pool is 25 metres long. That every number I am about to read, every wall touch, every dolphin kick after a turn — all are measured by a different ruler than the Olympic one. And so my problem begins: how do I tell a sports story when its very stage has not yet revealed itself fully? I have followed swimming since 2026, when I was a trainee reporter at a sports newspaper. Back then I was assigned the swimming beat — the one colleagues called "barren", because Vietnamese readers care more about football than about lanes. But I learned one thing: swimming is the most honest sport. No referee whistles against a beautiful stroke. No VAR erases a hundredth of a second. There is only water, and time. Tonight in Baku is a stop on the World Cup — the short-course commercial series, ranked below the Olympics, below the long-course World Championships, and below even the short-course World Championships. 2026 is a mid-cycle year: two years after Paris 2026, two years before Los Angeles 2028. No Olympics. No long-course World Championships (that meet runs in odd years). This is a year in which swimmers are in a "maintenance" state — not peak form, but a sustaining heartbeat. The World Cup in Baku has one feature that caught my eye immediately: the format. Events with ten or fewer entrants are contested finals-only, with no heats. That means many events here have thin fields — a sign of a stop still building its roster, not a saturated traditional stop. Baku. The windy city. The capital of Azerbaijan, on the shore of the Caspian Sea. An emerging swimming market on the Silk Road corridor. World Aquatics — the world governing body for swimming, formerly FINA — has been extending its commercial footprint beyond the traditional power centres. Baku is part of that strategy. And I sit here, at the other end of the world, reading a live report of a session I have never set foot in. The first thing I do when I open the report is check data integrity. Not out of suspicion, but because I learned eight years ago that a mistake makes me re-read the world with a slower breath. And indeed, three problems surface at once. First, the meet format is not stated in the report. But the presence of the 100 IM is near-conclusive evidence: this is a 25-metre short-course meet. No long-course meet stages the 100 IM at international level. Second, there is an attribution error in the 50 freestyle prelim data. The report states "Katarzyna Wasick and Egor Kornev topped the men's 50 freestyle prelims in 23.56 and 20.73". Wasick is female; 23.56 is a women's time. This is an editing error, and it reminds me to be careful with every remaining number. Third, the top seed in the men's 400 freestyle is 3:56.52. At a short-course World Cup, an elite top seed in the 400 free usually sits between 3:36 and 3:42. A 3:56.52 is a soft seed — it tells me this event was not the marquee draw of the Baku stop, and the field is shallow. These three issues set a ceiling on my entire analysis: I can describe, not evaluate. Because the report provides no world-record reference lines, no season rankings, no split data. Every number here is data pending verification. But in a session where everything is "pending verification", there are still signals that speak. And I want to tell you about three of them. The first signal belongs to Evgeniia Chikunova. The women's 200 breaststroke. She swam the prelims in 2:17.35, clear of Ireland's Mona McSharry — second in 2:18.27 — by a full second. In a 200 breaststroke, a one-second gap in the prelims is a meaningful gap. It is not merely a matter of fast or slow; it is a matter of class. In prelims, top swimmers usually swim at 85–90 per cent capacity to save energy for the final. When someone swims at that level and still leaves the second-place swimmer a second behind, the final is nearly settled before the whistle sounds. Chikunova is Russian, competing under neutral status. This is a detail I will return to later, because it carries more sports-governance meaning than competitive meaning. The second signal belongs to the men's 100 breaststroke. This is a genuine race. Corbeau of the Netherlands swam 56.68. Houlie of South Africa swam 56.98. A gap of three-tenths of a second. In a short-course 100 breaststroke — where every turn is an opportunity and every start is a gamble — three-tenths of a second is nothing. This is the only event of the session where I dare say the outcome cannot be predicted. The third signal belongs to the men's 50 freestyle. Cameron McEvoy of Australia — now 32 — faces Egor Kornev of Russia, who swam 20.73 in the prelims, with McEvoy at 20.96. But this is not an endurance race. In short course, the 50 freestyle is decided by the start, by the first dolphin kick, and by a single turn. McEvoy is famous for his "no-breath, single-cycle" model — he swims the entire 50 metres without taking a breath. It is a technical gamble, and at 32 it is the gamble he chooses because it demands not youth, but absolute precision. But the signal I consider most important lies in the men's 100 IM. Five swimmers under 54 seconds: Barr 51.91, Benzing 52.49, Knox 52.72, Casas 52.90, Kolesnikov 53.74. This is a deep field. And notably, there is no "king" in this event. No one holds the throne. This is a wide-open discipline — and that very openness is the clearest signal of a World Cup stop's health. Kliment Kolesnikov — a Russian competing as a neutral — should be in his signature backstroke events. His appearance in the 100 IM with a 53.74 seed suggests two possibilities: either he is in a training block and needs racing sharpness, or he is deliberately expanding his versatility. With a top-level backstroke pedigree, he remains a dangerous finalist despite the slow seed. I want to devote a paragraph to Marrit Steenbergen of the Netherlands. She swam the women's 50 backstroke in 26.08, and also features in the 100 IM. Two finals in one session. In a session where eleven finals are packed into one programme, a swimmer racing two finals close together is a real energy-management factor. This is the most notable workload signal of the whole session. In the men's 200 backstroke, Blake Tierney of Canada leads with 1:50.69. Pieter Coetze of South Africa — a promising young backstroker — swam only 1:53.71, three seconds slower. A three-second gap in a 200 prelim is a large gap. It may mean Coetze cruised to save energy, or he had a poor morning. But it may also mean Tierney is at a different level at this stop. As for Carson Foster of the USA in the men's 400 free and Freya Colbert of Great Britain in the women's 400 free — the two top seeds — I will not say much. Because with seeds of 3:56.52 and 3:56.71 in short course, these are thin-field events, and their results carry little information about the bigger picture. I want to pause here, amid the numbers, to speak about what I consider the core of this entire session. There is a trap that anyone reading this report could fall into: comparing short-course numbers with long-course standards. This is the most serious mistake, and it is more common than people think. In a 25-metre pool, the number of turns doubles compared with a 50-metre pool. Every turn is an opportunity to push off the wall and accelerate — a move you do not have mid-lane in long course. The result is that short-course times are systematically faster than long-course times, and records are ratified separately. A short-course record is not a long-course record. A short-course performance cannot be compared with an Olympic performance. So when I read that Chikunova swam 2:17.35 in the 200 breaststroke, I do not think about whether she can break a long-course world record. I think about the fact that she is swimming in a different frame of reference. And when I read that McEvoy swam 20.96 in the 50 freestyle, I know that number only means something in a short-course context. But there is a deeper layer to this trap. It is the question: is short course a different sport? My answer is: almost. Short course rewards swimmers with excellent turn and dolphin-kick technique, and punishes those who are strong only in "open-water-style" swimming strength. A long-course champion may be merely a mid-level short-course swimmer, and vice versa. This means results in Baku predict little for long course. And here is where I want to speak about the blind spot of collective memory. People say 2-1 is a scoreline; I say it is the manifesto of the forgotten. In Baku, people may remember the big names: Foster, McEvoy, Chikunova. But what this report truly recounts is not the story of stars. It tells the story of an emerging market, of a series extending its footprint, of neutral athletes swimming without a flag on their chest. Three Russian swimmers appear in Baku: Chikunova, Kornev, and Kolesnikov. They compete under neutral status — a participation channel allowing athletes from certain federations to compete without national representation. Their presence here, in 2026, tells me that World Aquatics' neutral-status framework is still functioning. It is not merely symbolic; it is a real competitive channel, where top athletes still compete and still win. This is what I think results reports usually overlook. They give names, times, placings. They do not mention that an athlete is swimming without a flag. They do not mention that a pool in a city on the Caspian shore is becoming a link in the sport's global commercial chain. And this is when I realise what this report truly is: a record, not an analysis. It records what happened, but does not explain why. It gives numbers, but not context. And in a sport where a hundredth of a second can be the line between glory and oblivion, the absence of context is a serious shortcoming. An empty stadium, only the ball weeping into a poem — I once wrote that about a football match during a pandemic. Tonight, I could write a similar line about the Baku pool: a pool without applause, only the sound of water split in two by hands. But I will not write it that way. Because here, the problem is not silence. The problem is ambiguity. There is one thing I want to make clear: I do not doubt the athletes' integrity. I do not doubt they swam their hardest. What I doubt is our ability — we readers, we writers, we analysts — to understand correctly what happened. When a report has no cited sources, when an event is dated in the future, when an attribution error slips past the editor's eye, then the question is no longer "who won" but "do we truly know who won". And that is why I always review footage at least twice before writing. Not because I distrust the results. But because I believe the truth lies in the deepest dive, not on the surface of the scoreline. Now let me speak about what I consider most worth watching in this finals session. Chikunova in the women's 200 breaststroke is the event most likely to end in a comfortable victory. A one-second prelim gap is a solid foundation. If she swims under 2:17 in the final, that will be a strong signal of her short-course form this season. The men's 100 breaststroke duel between Corbeau and Houlie is the least predictable event. A three-tenths gap in the prelims will almost certainly compress in the final, when both empty the tank. This is where a wall touch, a turn half a beat slow, can decide everything. And the men's 50 freestyle between McEvoy and Kornev is where the start and the technical gamble reign. If the final margin is under two-tenths, it will be a genuine duel — and it will confirm that the organisers were right to give the event marquee billing. As for the other events — 400 freestyle, women's 50 backstroke, men's 200 backstroke, women's 200 butterfly, men's 100 butterfly — they appear more stable, with clear leaders and safe gaps. But "stable" in swimming does not mean "certain". A false start, a botched turn, a missed breath — and everything can flip. I want to close with a thought about what Baku means. World Aquatics is extending its commercial footprint beyond traditional centres. Baku is part of that strategy. But there is a tension here: a stop in an emerging market may struggle to secure field depth. The evidence is the rule that events with ten or fewer entrants are contested finals-only — an efficiency measure, but also a sign of thin fields. This is the question I carry after reading the report: can a sport both expand geographically and maintain competitive quality? Or are we trading depth for breadth? I have no answer. But I know that in a 25-metre pool in Baku, there are athletes swimming without a flag, names audiences have never heard, and numbers we cannot yet verify. And perhaps, precisely in those gaps, the sport's real story is being written. The Baku symphony: written in vapour, played in breaths not yet shaped. I will leave the notebook open at the page with the line "Hazard, not Ha-zan". Because tonight, I am reminded again that calling an event by its right name is as hard as calling a person by his. And sometimes, the most honest thing a writer can do is say: I do not yet know everything. The Baku pool closes its first session. The numbers lie there, awaiting verification. And I, as always, will open the footage a second time.