Great Britain strike relay double gold on opening day in Paris
Great Britain won both the women's and men's 4x200m freestyle relay gold medals on the opening day of the European Aquatics Championships in Paris. The men's quartet of Matt Richards, James Guy, Jack McMillan and Duncan Scott — all Olympic champions — shattered the championship record in 7:01.52, beating France and Germany to the wall. France's Léon Marchand, the home crowd's great hope, settled for silver. (BBC Sport; France 24)
The 4x200m freestyle relay is a race of endurance and teamwork: four swimmers each cover 200 metres freestyle in succession, and the cumulative time decides the medals. At this level the margins are brutal — a single slow exchange (the hand-to-hand transition between swimmers at the wall) can cost a team a place on the podium.
Britain's men clocked 7:01.52 for the eight lengths of the pool, a time that rewrote the championship record and underlined a relay programme that has been building momentum for over a year. The same squad won gold at the Singapore 2025 World Aquatics Championships, where they also broke the European record. (European Aquatics)
To win both the men's and women's 4x200m freestyle relays on the same night is a statement of depth. Most nations are grateful to field one world-class relay quartet; Britain now has two.
For the men's team, the pieces are familiar. Richards and Guy were part of the Olympic gold-medal-winning 4x200m freestyle relay at Tokyo 2021. Scott, a four-time Olympic silver medallist alongside his relay gold, brings the anchoring nous. McMillan, the relative newcomer, slotted in seamlessly. Together they train and race with a fluency that comes from years of shared squads and national camps.
Marchand's silver will sting in a Paris pool that had hoped to see him replicate his Olympic heroics from 2024, when the Frenchman won four golds across a single Games. But relay swimming is the great leveller: one swimmer, however brilliant, cannot win it alone.
What stands out is the consistency. Britain's relay gold in Singapore last summer was not a one-off — it was the first page of a chapter that now includes a championship record on European soil. The Paris pool is the same venue that hosted the 2024 Olympic swimming, and British swimmers are making themselves at home in it.
The European Aquatics Championships continue through the week, with individual freestyle events still to come. Several members of both relay squads will race individually, and the form they carry from the opening night will give their rivals pause.
