Equipment error no bar to breaststroke star’s latest world mark

Add a full tenth of a second to Adam Peaty’s latest world record time — and it’s still a world record.

Yesterday, the British swimmer was in the unusual situation of having his best mark in the 100m breaststroke at the European Championships corrected to 57.10 seconds from the 57.00s time shown in Sunday’s race.

The European aquatics federation said there was “a problem with the race timing equipment” during the first nine races of the afternoon session that day, which included the 100m breaststroke final where Olympic champion Peaty improved his own previous best mark of 57.13s from the Rio de Janeiro Games.

“The starting mechanism had been incorrectly configured prior to the start of the session which resulted in all reported times being 0.10s faster due to a configuration delay of 0.10s,” the European aquatics federation said.

The federation added it worked with the timing system operators and “carried out extensive tests to confirm this system configuration error” and it had “revised all recorded times for the first nine races during that session”.

The other world record in the same session an hour later by Russian Kliment Kolesnikov in the 50m backstroke remained unaffected and was confirmed at 24.00s.

“We want this event to be remembered for the amazing achievements of the athletes, so it is important that the results are correct,” said British Swimmnig’s national performance director Chris Spice.

“We don’t want this to take away from Adam’s amazing performance which we all experienced in a fantastic arena.”

Although there was no immediate doubt about the timing after Sunday’s race, Peaty’s reaction time at the start was measured at an extraordinary 0.47s, which has now been corrected to 0.57s.

It was the 10th world record for the 23-year-old Peaty, who has the 14 fastest times in the discipline and is the only swimmer to beat the 58s mark. Last year, he announced “Project 56,” his ambition to go under 57s as well.

Peaty, who is a five-time world champion, can win his 10th European long-course title in the 50m breaststroke on Thursday.