Welcome to the 2nd prelims session of the 2026 European Championships! Directly following Sjostrom, European record holder David Popovici will race the men’s 100 freestyle, also as the top seed. Hubert Kos leads the men’s 200 backstroke field, and we will be on World Record watch over the next few days as he hunts Aaron Peirsol‘s supersuit record of 1:51.92. He came into the meet with a lifetime best of 1:55.88 from the European Junior Championships, just three hundredths faster than Ndoye-Brouard‘s prelims swim of 1:55.91. European record holder Johannes Liebmann set the top qualifying time of 7:41.87, just half-a-second ahead of Hungary’s Zalan Sarkany, who swam 7:42.34 in the same heat.