The Olympic champion from Tokyo won the first international 10km of the season at the World Aquatics Open Water Swimming World Cup in Soma Bay, Egypt.
For the second straight World Cup, Germany’s Florian Wellbrock came out of the men’s 10km race on top, winning Friday morning’s race by over 10 seconds ahead of France’s Logan Fontaine and Marc-Antoine Olivier.
After taking the lead on lap three of six during the race, Wellbrock never relinquished his lead and took the race to the finish, opening up 2025 with a gold medal.
Wellbrock is the Olympic champion from Tokyo 2020 and was the first to qualify for Paris 2024 by virtue of his win at the 2023 World Championships in Fukuoka, Japan. Wellbrock has been known to swim well in still conditions and struggled in choppier waters. In Paris, with choppy conditions, he was eighth.
On Friday, with the water temperature at 21 Celsius and with waves throughout, this win for Wellbrock is a breakthrough.
“Yes, that’s right,” Wellbrock said. “It’s part of the game to deal with rough conditions and it is what it is and you just have to deal with it. I think the key today was just to save that little bit of extra energy in the first half. And, yeah, pushing forward at the end.”
“Conditions were tough,” Wellbrock said, who won at 2:01:33.60. “Normally, I don’t like the choppy water, but I tried to save a lot of energy in the first half of the race.
“The French guys, they pushed a lot, especially on the fifth lap. I stayed behind them and just focused on the last lap, where I wanted to push forward to finish first. I’m a little bit excited about my result. I told you it’s not my favourite conditions, so that makes me so happy with my first place today.”
This was the first race under the guise of the new open water swimming world rankings as Wellbrock was ninth entering the day.
Fontaine finished second overall at 2:01:44.10 ahead Olivier (2:01:44.40) and Australia’s Nicholas Sloman (2:01:45.30).
“It was a good race,” Fontaine said. “I knew I wasn’t in the best of my shape - I’ve only been training hard for one month. I took a long break after the Olympics. I wasn’t taking so many risks in the race; I was always looking to rest in the race to have a great push for the end of the race.
“I saw that no one wanted to close the gap and catch up to (Florian) Wellbrock. I took this as an advantage and fought for second.”
France’s rising star Sacha Velly was in the top pack as well, finishing fifth at 2:01:45.60.
“We are each very individual people,” Fontaine said. “We each want to win, and we also want to be the first Frenchman. Sometimes, that pushes us up to the top. Two French on the podium is nice: it was impossible to catch him (Wellbrock) today.”
Italy was able to have two in the top ten with Andrea Filadelli (2:01:46.00) and Dario Verani (2:01:47.20) in sixth and seventh.
Australia’s Kyle Lee (2:01:58.90), Poland’s Piotr Wozniak (2:02:02.10) and Great Britain’s Hector Pardoe (2:02:04.70) rounded out the top ten.
Notably, Olympic silver medalist Oliver Klemet was 17th, and Italy’s Gregorio Paltrinieri was disqualified for a race infraction.