Italian 16-year-old Benedetta Pilato broke the women’s 50 metre breaststroke world record at the European swimming championships in Budapest with a time of 29.30 seconds in Saturday’s semi-finals. The previous long course best of 29.40 was set by U.S. swimmer Lilly King, the reigning Olympic 100m breaststroke champion, at the world championships in the same pool in the Hungarian capital in 2017.

“I thought I might break the European record but definitely not the world record,” said Pilato, who was silver medallist behind King in the non-Olympic event at the 2019 world championships. The final is on Sunday. Another young swimmer also made headlines in the Duna Arena pool, with 17-year-old Anastasia Gorbenko denying Hungary’s Olympic champion Katinka Hosszu a sixth successive 200m individual medley gold.