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Athlete library · Swimming
Emre Sakcı: Below 25 seconds in breaststroke
Emre Sakcı’s short-course 50m breaststroke world record is a landmark sprint performance for Turkish swimming.
Career landmark · 2021Türkiye
At a glance
- Discipline
- Swimming
- Role / event
- 50 m / 100 m breaststroke
- Landmark
- 24.95 · short-course 50m
Idobi / Wikimedia Commons · Visual record and provenance ↗ · CC BY-SA 4.0 ↗ · Open the full-size visual ↗
A sprint specialist in breaststroke
Emre Sakcı became prominent in Turkish swimming through sprint breaststroke. His competition history includes 50m and 100m racing, with short-course and long-course performances forming separate strands. That distinction is more than a statistical convention. Pool length changes the number of turns and the proportion of the race spent accelerating away from a wall. His short-course speed therefore needs to be understood within its own environment. European and world podium appearances also show a competitive career extending beyond one record attempt. At the centre of his story is technical specialisation in a stroke where coordination and speed must work together over a very short period.
↑ Back to dossier contentsWhat 24.95 meant in December 2021
At a national short-course meet in Gaziantep on 27 December 2021, Sakcı completed the 50m breaststroke in 24.95 seconds, a performance recorded as a world record. It was achieved in a 25m pool. A 50m race in that setting contains a turn, whereas the same distance in a 50m pool does not. The two results therefore belong to separate record categories. Dating the achievement also preserves the distinction between setting a record and making a permanent claim about a changing record list. His swim demonstrated that a domestic competition in Türkiye could become the setting for a performance at the very highest global level.
↑ Back to dossier contentsChampionship success alongside the record
Sakcı’s international results include European short-course 50m breaststroke silver medals in Glasgow in 2019 and Kazan in 2021. In 2024 he won the long-course European title over that distance in Belgrade, then took silver at the short-course World Championships in Budapest. These achievements explain why his career cannot be represented by the record alone. A record measures a time under defined conditions; a championship medal describes the result against the field assembled for a particular event. Both forms of achievement appear in his story. Podiums in different pool formats add another dimension, showing competitive success across settings with different technical demands.
↑ Back to dossier contentsThe connected parts of a short race
In sprint breaststroke, a small finishing margin can be created across several phases: leaving the blocks, moving into surface swimming, coordinating arms and legs, turning in a short-course race and approaching the final touch. There is little time to recover from a poor transition. This context explains why the event cannot be described through strength alone; it does not claim to reveal Sakcı’s private training programme. His career makes Turkish swimming’s high-speed technical achievements visible alongside success in endurance events. Reading medals and records as separate parts of the biography gives a fuller picture of that contribution and of the specialist skill required to compete consistently in this demanding sprint discipline.
↑ Back to dossier contentsEmre Sakcı, Netanya 2015. An archive crop from the competition, not a photograph of his later records. Idobi / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
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Official reference points used to verify the chronology and interpretive frame on this page.
- Emre Sakcı — career and results record ↗World Aquatics
Source consulted for the biography and competition context. Checked: 13 September 2026.
- Emre Sakcı — career and results record ↗World Aquatics
Source consulted for the biography and competition context. Checked: 13 September 2026.