Kevin Cordes looked “easy” in prelims, and still swam the all-time fastest 200 breaststroke by a full second. In the finals of the 2013 Men’s NCAA Championship 200 yard breaststroke, he didn’t look quite as easy…which explains why he cut more than a second off of the record. That means in one day, he’s taken this record down by over two seconds and is now two seconds faster than anybody else has ever been in this race. That’s the sort of stand-alone dominance we’ve only seen from some of the world’s great swimmers – Michael Phelps in the 400 meter IM, Sun Yang in the 1500 meter free, and Kevin Cordes in the 200 breaststroke.

Cordes Finals 24.61 27.58 28.59 27.90 1:48.68 Cordes Prelims 24.86 27.96 28.45 28.52 1:49.79 Cordes ’12 24.92 28.45 28.49 28.87 1:50.73

The comparative splits show that Cordes was out much faster on the front-half, took about a 50 to recover, and torched his way toward home.

The second-fastest swimmer in history is Cody Miller from Indiana in 1:51.03. That’s 2.33 seconds slower, which calculates out to 2.14% slower. There are certainly other sports where records are 2% ahead of the second-best, but in swimming that sort of margin is almost unheard of over 200 yards.