The 2025 World Cup ended on a High-Five note of World short-course records that included, in order of the showstoppers that unfolded:

• 7:54.00 - 800m freestyle, Lani Pallister (AUS) wiping more than three seconds off Katie Ledecky's 2022 standard - Final No2
• 1:57.33 - 200m backstroke, Kaylee McKeown (AUS) shaving a further half a second off the mark she set a week ago, with Regan Smith (USA) 0.01sec inside the previous mark, too - Final No5
• 48.16 - 100m backstroke, Hubert Kós (HUN) axing 0.62sec off his week-old Cup record to take 0.17sec off American Coleman Stewart's 2021 standard - Final No6
• 1:59.52 - 200m breaststroke, Caspar Corbeau (NED) becoming the first man ever to race inside 2 mins in the event, his time confining to history the 2:00.16 of Kirill Prigoda in 2018. And home in second, Japan's 16-year-old Shin Ohashi took down the World junior record in 2:02.03 for his third global youth - Final No7
• 49.93 - 100m freestyle, Kate Douglass (USA) becoming the first woman ever to race inside 50sec in the event, her time 0.26sec faster than the standard she set 6 days ago at the second of the three Cup rounds to better Aussie Cate Campbell's 50.25 from 2017. - Final No8

Two of those records and the consistency of the size and scale of victories on the tour delivered the titles of King and Queen of the 2025 World Cup to Kós and Douglass.

There were also Cup records for Americans Shaine Casas, in the first final of the concluding day of the 2025 tour, and Gretchen Walsh:

• 3:56.13 - 400m medley, Shaine Casas (USA), who took down the 3:57.25 that had stood to Japan's Daiya Seto since 2018. Seto owns the World record still: in 3:54. 81 from 2019.
• 53.10 - 100m butterfly, Gretchen Walsh (USA), who wiped out the 53.69 Cup standard she set at round 1 of the 2025 tour two weeks ago, rattling her own scorching 52.71 World record, set for the global s/c championships crown in Budapest last December.

Amazing swimming, thrilling for the 1400 or so folk lucky enough to be there to witness it live at The Toronto Pan Am Sports Centre, and for the many more swim fans beyond in the remote digital/streamlining world we live in.

On the money side, winning counts on the cup. No, no $1m bonus offered for the 'fake achievement' of 'breaking a record' that the swimmer is simply not eligible for (enhanced), but here is what it means to athletes and why 'match day' is something that demands and needs the live audience in venue as well as the folk tuning in remotely:

How The Cup Banked A 54.5k Pay Day For Kharun & Ripened A Maple Rivalry With Liendo

Swimming Canada’s take on Ilya Kharun’s World Cup tour campaign speaks to what it means to the athlete and where swimming finds itself on the evolutionary stream as a sport that demands highly professional preparation but is still learning how to dress its shopwindow in between Olympics

State Of Swimming +Craig Lord

Two other takes neither popular nor populist:

• a glance at the world media database indicates that the tour did little to 'grow' the sport beyond 'base' ... 'grow' meaning that tricky line of constitutional obligation that calls on governors to rethink how and what sells the sport, and what might help swimming get a firmer grasp on the rungs of a highly competitive ranking of sports that attract a marketplace capable of matching the professionalism of athletes with a professional wage-based economy. My top line in what sells sport is "simplicity and accessibility" coupled with "who are the humans/ the athletes and why should I be interested" + who tells their deeper story - and does race day allow for that? Take niche away and the entire tour gets a relative few mainstream lines in print and online the world over. Indeed, as a tour, it is largely ignored, coverage almost wholly limited to "our national teamster x set [fill in the level] record y". In the mix is the matter of how to overcome the "once-every-four-years" Olympic status swimming is identified with beyond its backyard pool.
• Those phenomenal World-record swims, and the wave of national records that followed them on to the podiums - such as the vault of new standards established by Ireland's Ellen Walshe and Olympic bronze medallist Mona McSharry - and even, on a few occasions, fourth places, highlight the Cup tour's struggle to live up to its title in this sense: in the majority of finals, half the line-up did not make the 900-point mark.

To respond to those facts with 'don't be so negative' would be to miss the point: the World Cup has the potential to grant swimming an annual season, a time and place on the calendar where the world knows there is a Cup, a league, a Duel, a tradition building in a new-look shopwindow built to encourage would-be fans to linger long enough to feel they want to walk through the door and sit down with the rest of us. Formats can be improved in a way that makes that shopwindow look too busy (swim folk may understand and know it not to be the case, but there's a view held of swimming world records out there, which goes "so many world records all at once - so, easy and not that special, right?"...)

Meanwhile, the show the athletes put on was great, the gushing presentation and same-old poolside exchanges that tell us nothing we didn't know and nothing to a would-be audience on "who are the athletes".

The tour goes Asian / Silk Road in 2026 before 2027 delivers a new departure for the Cup: World Aquatics has pegged qualification for the new Olympic stroke 50s (backstroke, breaststroke, butterfly) to the pre-Games Cup tour in Europe around this time in 2027. It is one of a few moves aimed at encouraging swimmers to attend the World Cup series, including reducing the number of rounds of the Cup in any season to three and having all of them on one continent/region in each passing year to cut down on costs, travel times and, arguably, carbon footprints.

Olympic 50m Stroke Tickets Up For Grabs At 2027 World Cup!!

World Aquatics to couple World Cup to qualification for the LA 2028 with top six finishers in each of the new 50m stroke events on 2027 Cup Tour securing automatic qualification for the LA Olympics

State Of Swimming +Craig Lord

There's more evolution to come before swimming can say it has found the right books in between Olympic book ends.

Meanwhile, here are the last-days finals in Toronto, result and race videos:

The World Records

Women's 800m Free

Women's 200m backstroke

Men's 100m backstroke

Men's 200m breaststroke

Women's 100m freestyle

World Cup Marks For Casas and Walsh

Men's 400m medley

Women's 100m butterfly

In other finals

RESULTS IN FULL - ALL THREE ROUNDS - AT OMEGA

Our analysis of the world records, key races and pay days will be emailed to subscribers in the coming days ...