Five of Portugal's seven European swimming medals have arrived since 2022
We counted them edition by edition. Camila Rebelo's silver in Paris is only the seventh Portuguese medal in a century of European long-course championships, and the official split sheet shows she swam the fastest last 50 metres in the final.
Camila Rebelo left Paris with silver in the 200m backstroke and a national record of 2:07.62. Good news on its own terms. How good only becomes clear once you count the others.
So we counted. We went through all 38 editions of the European long-course swimming championships, from the first in 1926, and added up the Portuguese medals one edition at a time, pool swimming only, no open water, no diving, no short course. The answer is seven. Seven medals in a hundred years of the competition.
All seven, in order
Sofia, 1985: Alexandre Yokochi, silver in the 200m breaststroke. The first, and for a very long time the only one.
London, 2016: Alexis Santos, bronze in the 200m individual medley, 31 years after Yokochi.
Rome, 2022: two bronzes in the same week, Diogo Ribeiro in the 50m butterfly at the age of 17, and Gabriel Lopes in the 200m individual medley.
Belgrade, 2024: Rebelo wins the 200m backstroke and becomes the first Portuguese woman to be crowned European champion in a long-course pool. Francisca Martins adds bronze in the 400m freestyle.
Paris, 2026: Rebelo, silver in the 200m backstroke.
One gold, two silvers, four bronzes. That breakdown matches how the Paris medal was described at the time, the seventh ever and the second silver, which gave us a second way of checking a tally we assembled by hand.
What changed in 2022
Five of the seven came in the last three editions. Portuguese swimming has won more in four years than in the previous 96, and it has done so with different names in different events, which is the opposite of a fluke.
Worth holding on to that ratio the next time someone mentions another Portuguese podium. Standing on one is still very rare. What has changed is that it stopped being a one-off.
The bit buried in the split sheet
Omega’s official results sheet for the 200m backstroke final carries a column almost nobody reads, the 50-metre splits, and that is where Rebelo’s race gets interesting. She was fourth at 50 metres, up to second by 100, and she held the place from there.
Her closing 50 took 31.77 seconds. None of the other seven finalists came home that fast, not even Katie Shanahan, the British swimmer who won in 2:06.13 and closed in 32.48. Rebelo lost this final in the first half of it, not the second.
She finished 1.54 seconds off the championship record, which has belonged to Margherita Panziera since Budapest in 2021. Pauline Mahieu took bronze for the host nation in 2:08.63.
It was a decent week for Portuguese sport in general, between the Volta a Portugal crossing the Douro and Braga drawing Austria Wien in the Conference League play-off. Measured in years per medal, though, nothing else comes close to this one.
By Vasco Almada
Chart: Tugadaily · data from FPN and European Aquatics
