Tierney and Wilm serve highlights for Team Canada at 2025 World Aquatics Championships

SINGAPORE – A pair of T-Birds certainly made their mark at the World Aquatics Championships, which wrapped up on Sunday in Singapore.

Blake Tierney, fresh off a great season at UBC where he helped the Men's Swimming team win their 21st national championship, put forth a series of fantastic races in the 200m Backstroke event.

The Saskatoon native got off to a blistering start in the heats, breaking the Canadian record with a time of 1:55.17, putting him as the top seed heading into the semifinals later that same day. There, he broke the national record yet again with a time of 1:55.03, sending him into the finals.



While he ended up missing out on a medal by less than half a second, Tierney's fourth-place finish and remarkable consistency (with all three of his races finishing under the previous national record mark) showed the form he was in.

That continued in the 4x100m Medley, where Tierney led off Canada's relay team in the heats with a time of 52.95 seconds in the backstroke, a personal best. He and his teammates Oliver Dawson, Ilya Kharun and Ruslan Gaziev broke the national record for the event, qualifying for the finals with a time of 3:30.86.

That group (with Josh Liendo subbing in for Gaziev) finished in fifth-place in the finals, bettering their heat time by about a second for another Canadian record, but finishing 1.13 seconds off the podium.

UBC alumna Ingrid Wilm also had a great outing in Singapore, earning a bronze medal in the 4x100m Mixed Medley. Teaming up with Liendo, Dawson and Brooklyn Douthwright in the heats, the Canadian quartet qualified for the finals with the fifth-best time in the preliminary round.

With Kylie Masse and Taylor Ruck subbing in for Wilm and Douthwright in the final, Canada's third-place finish was an absolute nailbiter, as Ruck touched the wall just seven hundredths of a second ahead of Dutch swimmer Marrit Steenbergen.


 
Wilm also qualified for the 50m Backstroke final alongside Masse, where she finished in eighth place in an incredibly tight race with every swimmer separated by less than half a second.

Finlay Knox – the reigning Canada West and U SPORTS Male Swimmer of the Year – also competed at the World Championships, where he just barely missed qualification for the 200m Medley semifinals in an incredibly tight preliminary round.