Twenty-point-eight-eight seconds. That’s all it took for Cameron McEvoy to erase a record that had survived over 16 years, the super-suit era’s ban, and every sprinter who tried.

The 31-year-old Australian touched the wall at the China Open in Shenzhen on Friday in 20.88 seconds, shaving three hundredths off the 20.91 that Brazil’s César Cielo posted in December 2009. That mark was set in a polyurethane bodysuit — the high-tech gear banned months later for turning record books into rough drafts. McEvoy did it in textile.

“It feels crazy,” McEvoy told reporters poolside. “I’ve been putting a lot of effort into training to go under 21 seconds. My initial goal was 20-point-anything, even if it was 20.99.”

He got considerably better than 20.99. The Olympic champion from Paris 2024 and reigning world champion from Singapore credited a revamped training block focused on strength development, describing what followed last year’s worlds as “an insane season of training.” “I couldn’t ask for anything better,” he said.

The result leaves just six of the 40 current Olympic swimming records still dating to the super-suit window of 2008–09 — a number that shrinks almost every season now as modern swimmers claw back what the polyurethane age distorted.

For McEvoy, fatherhood and a late-career renaissance have made an unlikely pairing. At 31, he is swimming faster than he ever did in his twenties, proving that sprint speed doesn’t always belong to the young.

Sources