If you want to know who will be racing for medals at LA28 and Brisbane 2032, the place to look last week was Munich. The 2026 European Junior Swimming Championships wrapped up on Sunday after six days of finals that produced championship records, national records and the kind of fearless racing that marks generational shifts in the sport.
Foltyn’s Breakout Week
No swimmer left Munich with more momentum than Jan Foltyn. The Czech sprinter opened the meet by shattering the championship record in the boys’ 50m breaststroke with 27.18, erasing a mark that had belonged to Nicolo Martinenghi, now an Olympic champion, since 2017. Records held by future Olympic gold medallists are exactly the ones worth breaking, and Foltyn was not finished: he also ripped a Czech national record of 22.03 in the 50m freestyle semifinals, announcing himself as a genuine two-stroke sprint talent.
Shcherbakov Doubles Up
Mikhail Shcherbakov, competing as a neutral athlete, produced the meet’s most complete performance, setting a championship record of 1:57.07 in the boys’ 200m individual medley and adding the 100m backstroke title in 53.99, a final decided by a single hundredth of a second over France’s Nathan Muratory. Germany’s home crowd had its moment too, with Linda Roth taking the girls’ 200m freestyle in 1:57.79, while Greece’s Evangelos Efrain Ntoumas won the boys’ 100m breaststroke in 59.91 as the only man in the field under the minute barrier.
The Pipeline Keeps Producing
Junior meets matter because history says they do. The senior stars currently rewriting the record books, from Summer McIntosh and her four concurrent world records to Europe’s emerging sprint generation, almost all announced themselves at exactly this kind of championship. With next year's World Aquatics Championships in Beijing trialling a ten-lane pool and the road to LA28 shortening by the month, the teenagers who conquered Munich will not stay juniors for long.
European swimming has fretted about the gap to the United States, Australia and Canada in the women’s events in particular. Munich offered reassurance in both directions: depth in the sprints, quality in the medley events, home-crowd champions in the German pool and a cohort visibly unafraid of fast company or big occasions. Remember the names. In two summers’ time, several of them will be racing under the Los Angeles sun with rather more at stake.
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