Junya Koga\u00a0<\/strong>of Japan smoked the competition in semi-finals of the men’s 50 backstroke, powering to the only sub-23 second swim of the evening. Koga stopped the clock at a 22.81 to not only claim the top seed going into tomorrow night’s final, but also moves up to fourth All-Time with a new Asian Record. The previous Asian Record was a 22.88, set by Koga himself in 2009 while swimming at a World Cup meet in Germany.<\/p>\n Belarus’\u00a0Pavel\u00a0Yankovich\u00a0<\/strong>picked up the second place seed with a time of 23.07, while France’s\u00a0Jeremy Stravius\u00a0<\/strong>snagged third with a time of 23.16.<\/p>\n Bobby Hurley\u00a0<\/strong>of Australia finished fourth in semi-finals with a time of 23.20, followed by Spain’s\u00a0Miguel Ortiz-Canavate<\/strong> and his time of 23.33.<\/p>\n Venezuela’s\u00a0Albert Subirats\u00a0<\/strong>(23.37), China’s\u00a0Xu Jiayu<\/strong> (23.39), and Poland’s\u00a0Tomasz Polewka<\/strong> (23.47) qualified as sixth through eighth respectively.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Men’s 50 Back Semi-Finals: Junya Koga\u00a0of Japan smoked the competition in semi-finals of the men’s 50 backstroke, powering to the only sub-23 second swim of the evening. Koga stopped the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":149019,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"dois","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[58802],"class_list":["post-232711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world","tag-2016-fina-sc-world-championships"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\r\n