Gold medals for Georgia Davies and the men’s 4x200m freestyle relay quartet made this a fun Sunday for Great Britain at the European Swimming Championships in Glasgow. Both were equally assertive, with the Welshwoman victorious in the 50 metres backstroke despite falling short of the continental record she set in the heats and her male colleagues unburdened by the expectation that comes with being world champions.

Duelling with Russia for much of the final, Calum Jarvis, Duncan Scott, Tom Dean and James Guy maintained the pressure until their rivals broke. Guy took over with less than a half‑second cushion on the closing leg but accelerated away. A championship record of 7min 05.32sec fully justified his overnight withdrawal from the 200m butterfly to throw everything into this.

“We knew deep down in our hearts that we could get a win, it was just how we were going to do it,” he said. “The Russians are getting stronger and stronger but the crowd was immense. Obviously if you’re going to have a bad year this is the year to do it because it’s an off-year when you’re not racing the Americans and the Chinese and it’s not the Olympics or world championships. Getting the win was most important.”

For Scott especially, the presumed burden which comes with being Scotland’s poster boy of the pool looks like feathers on the shoulders of the 21-year-old. Twice an Olympic silver medallist in the relays at Rio 2016, he is now emerging as a potential individual achiever of some stature. Commonwealth champion in the 100m freestyle in April, he added silver in the event here before regrouping for the relay. But in his leg, he sat sixth at the turn before rebounding to trail the Italian teenager Alessandro Miressi’s golden effort of 48.10sec.

“It’s tough because I’ve not got the easy speed that I might have had at other points in the year so I had to use different skills,” Scott said. “It was another one of those blanket finishes in the 100 free and I was just fortunate to get my hand on the wall to do that.”

Davies likes this Tollcross pool, the venue for her Commonwealth gold in 2014. At 27, she finally earned an individual European title, touching the wall in 27.23sec ahead of Russia’s Anastasia Fesikova, two-hundredths off her time in the heats.

“I never ever would have expected to get a European record,” she said. “So when I got that in the heat I actually put a bit of pressure on myself because I felt ‘my god, people will need me to go faster now’. But when it comes to the final it’s all about racing the other girls. The times are irrelevant in the final. You just need to go and race and it’s all about who can get their hand on the wall first.”

Siobhan-Marie O’Connor was fifth in the 100m breaststroke final while Max Litchfield and Mark Szaranek qualified second and fourth fastest for the 200m individual medley final on Monday. Ross Murdoch appeared ominously quick in winning his 200m breaststroke semi-final with James Wilby, a silver medallist in Saturday’s 100m final, also making the cut.

Adam Peaty: ‘I was going in the water thinking I don’t want to be here’ Read more

Amid the medals, the loudest chatter in Glasgow surrounded the validity of Adam Peaty’s latest world record in the 100m breaststroke which has been cast into doubt after a fault was discovered in the event’s timing system.

The Olympic champion was thought to have lowered his own mark to exactly 57.00sec in taking gold at the event on Saturday. But officials from LEN, the governing body of European aquatics, confirmed on Sunday that his was one of five events where the starting system had been “incorrectly configured” with an investigation determining that the error “resulted in all reported times being 0.10s faster due to a configuration delay of 0.10s”.

Theoretically, Peaty – who will swim the 50m breaststroke on Tuesday – has now been adjudged to have lowered his mark to 57.10sec, three‑hundredths of a second quicker than his winning time at the Rio 2016 Olympics. But it is unclear whether Fina, the world governing body of the sport, will now ratify the revised time.

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“We support LEN’s vigilance in this matter and appreciate the time they have taken to make sure all times are correct,” said Chris Spice, the British Swimming performance director. “We want this event to be remembered for the amazing achievements of the athletes so it is important that the results are correct.”