European Swimming Championships: Sara Curtis wins gold and sets a world record in the 50-metre backstroke

There comes a moment when a talented athlete ceases to be merely a promising prospect and becomes a certainty. For Sara Curtis, that moment arrived in Paris, where the 20-year-old from Savigliano turned the 50-metre backstroke into a testament to her greatness: first, the sensational world record in the semi-final, 26.63, erasing the 26.86 set by Australia’s Kaylee McKeown, then the gold medal that definitively establishes her amongst the stars of world swimming with a new world record: 26.56. And as if that weren’t enough, she also helped the women’s 4x100 freestyle relay team to a silver medal yesterday.

A story that seems tailor-made for the world of sport. In Savigliano, on 19 August 2006, a little girl was born who was introduced to the water when she was just two years old. That water, which for so many is merely a swimming pool, soon became Sara’s home, her training ground, her refuge and, ultimately, her stage. Her father Vincenzo, a former amateur cyclist, and her mother Helen, originally from Nigeria and with a background in athletics, passed on to her a natural aptitude for sport. She added to this an extraordinary speed, fierce discipline and that lightness of touch that often characterises champions before the world takes notice of them.

Curtis is progressing steadily, without rushing things, but consistently raising the bar. In 2023, at the European Junior Championships in Belgrade, she won three golds and two silvers. In 2024, she took one of the most important steps of her career: at the Italian Championships in Riccione, she secured her place for Paris in the 50-metre freestyle, breaking the Italian record and becoming one of the great hopes of the new generation of Italian swimmers. Then came the European Junior Championships in Vilnius, where she racked up an impressive haul of six golds and one silver.

But the real breakthrough came in 2025. Curtis won the 50 and 100 metre freestyle events and, most importantly, took the Italian record for the 100 metre freestyle from Federica Pellegrini: 53.01 seconds compared to the 53.18 seconds that ‘La Divina’ had set in 2016. This was a hugely symbolic milestone, because it was not just a matter of a few hundredths of a second: it meant making his mark on the history of a sport by surpassing the name that had dominated that history for twenty years.

And Sara shows no signs of slowing down. In 2025, she also became the first Italian to compete in a 100-metre freestyle world final, in Singapore, confirming that she had firmly established herself amongst the international elite. In the meantime, she chose a different path, moving to the United States to study psychology and train at the University of Virginia, one of the leading programmes in American collegiate swimming. It was a choice made to grow, not to escape: new training sessions, new methods, new teammates, a whole new world.