Absolute world records in all four pool breath-hold disciplines have been claimed at the AIDA 2026 Pool Championships, held in the 50m pool in Budapest’s Duna Arena. Three of the records were set by Polish freedivers, the other by a German.
Magdalena Solich-Talanda from Poland swam 270m in the Dynamic Bi-Fins (DYNB) discipline on the opening competition day (2 June), surpassing the previous AIDA women’s world record of 259m. She has set the record twice before and on this occasion was reclaiming it from Hungary’s Zsófia Törőcsik.
The following competition day, devoted to Dynamic No Fins (DNF), fellow-Pole Mateusz Malina swam more than five lengths of the pool to clock a distance of 252m, outdoing his own AIDA world record of 250m.
His breaststroke swim marks the fifth occasion on which Malina has improved his own DNF world record, a progression that has made him the dominant athlete in the discipline for more than a decade.
“Because I had no expectations, I felt absolutely no stress,” said Malina afterwards. “And because of that, the dive went smoothly and the execution was simply perfect. Everything just clicked.
“I knew my preparation for this competition was extremely solid, but actually reaching this distance? It’s beyond anything I could have ever dreamed of.”
On the last day of the competition today (6 June) Malina struck again, this time breaking the Dynamic (DYN) distance record previously held by Chinese freediver Ming Jin. He did so by 6m, claiming a new record of 325m.
Poland has been extraordinarily dominant in pool freediving recently. Before Budapest, both Malina and Solich-Talanda already held multiple world records across the AIDA and CMAS disciplines.
In Static Apnea on Day 3, existing world record-holder Germany’s Heike Schwerdtner extended her pre-eminence in the discipline with a floating breath-hold lasting 9min 39sec.
Now 55, Schwerdtner had first set the record duration at 9min 7sec in 2024, blown that out of the water last year at 9min 22sec and has now managed to find another 17 seconds.
Competition performances are currently pending official ratification, which is normal procedure after championship records are claimed. Such an event yielding four world records in all four disciplines is exceptional and would make Budapest one of the most successful AIDA Pool World Championships in recent memory.
Underwater walking – with bronchitis
Meanwhile, Guinness World Records (GWR) has ratified the achievement of another Polish freediver, 60-year-old Stanisław Odbieżałek.
Despite suffering from bronchitis, he succeeded in extending his Longest Underwater Walk With One Breath (Male) record distance by 8% to 120.1m in a pool in Asker, Norway in March.
Odbieżałek had trained for 18 months for the novelty record bid. “The training was harder than it needed to be, and that was a very good thing, because it turned out that a week before setting the Guinness World Records title I got bronchitis,” he said, following his bent-forward weighted trudge along the pool-floor.
The freediver had not fully recovered: “Long before the dive, I was concentrating and fighting to get the coughing to stop bothering me for a moment, to get the scratchy feeling in my throat to stop,” he said. “When there was a brief pause like that and it settled, I said: ‘This is the moment.’
“I went and did it, and it even turned out that there was a little margin to spare. I could have gone further but, who knows, maybe we’ll improve on that next year!”
Odbiezalek’s previous record, set in June 2025, had been 110.7m – his claim at the time of 112.5m, reported on Divernet, was reduced during the verification process. He has also set several under-ice freediving records.
