Josh Willmer had already finished his race, already worked out what he was going to say about a bronze medal, and was waiting to talk to reporters in the mixed zone at Glasgow’s Tollcross International Swimming Centre when an official walked over and told him the colour had changed. He had won silver.
The 21-year-old New Zealander finished third in the men’s 100m breaststroke SB9 final at the Commonwealth Games, touching in 1min 11.44s. Australian Beau Matthews won the race in 1min 9.41s. Canadian Fernando Lu came home second, but was later disqualified on a technicality, and that decision lifted Willmer to silver and moved Australian Timothy Hodge up to bronze in 1min 12.74s.
Willmer had trailed in fourth place at the halfway mark before running down the field over the closing 50 metres. His time was a Games record for his classification. He learned about the upgrade second hand, minutes after the fact.
“It’s unreal, I had no idea,” he told RNZ. “I’m pretty stoked.”
“It’s a bummer to the guy who got DQ’ed, but silver – what an upgrade!”
He was happier still with how the swim itself had gone, which is the part he could actually control. “The race went perfectly to plan. It felt really good, it felt like I stuck to my race plan, and didn’t speed up my strokes heaps and kept to the basics,” he said.
The medal is Willmer’s second at a Commonwealth Games, but it did not come the way anyone expected. At Birmingham four years ago he was a 17-year-old who won gold in the men’s SB8 100m breaststroke. He arrived in Glasgow unable to defend that title, because the SB8 event is not on the programme at these Games.
Instead he raced up a class. In para-swimming, a lower classification number means a greater degree of impairment, so SB9 athletes are, broadly, less impaired than SB8 athletes. Willmer, who is a left arm amputee below the elbow, was giving away an advantage in every stroke he took against the field he was racing. He did it anyway, because it was that or stay home.
He was blunt about the odds before he left. “Most likely medals are going to be hard to get for me, the higher the class, the less disabled you are, but I’m just going to go up there and try my best. And if I get a medal, I get a medal, but mainly going there to see how good I can do,” he told RNZ ahead of the Games.
Racing people who are faster than him is not a novelty. It is close to his normal week. “It’s too good. I love racing against people that are better than me,” he said in Glasgow. “I train in an able-bodied environment and I pretty much race against able-bodied breaststrokers.”
Willmer was born in Ōtāhuhu and grew up at Kawakawa Bay in south Auckland, close enough to the water that swimming was never much of a decision. He started competing at eight. By his late teens he was a Commonwealth champion, and in 2024 he went to the Paris Paralympics, where he took 0.67 seconds off his own national record in the SB8 100m breaststroke heats with a swim of 1min 12.73s and then missed a place in the final by a single spot. That near miss is a large part of why the Glasgow result lands the way it does.
The silver adds to a Games campaign in which New Zealand’s medals have so far come almost entirely out of the pool. Erika Fairweather has three, with silver in the 400m freestyle, bronze in the 200m freestyle and silver in the 1500m freestyle. Lewis Clareburt took silver in the 200m individual medley in a personal best of 1min 56.77s, and Hazel Ouwehand won bronze in the 50m butterfly. New Zealand sent 114 athletes to Glasgow, and for the first four days the swimmers have carried the team.
Elsewhere on the same day the news was harder. RNZ reported that world steeplechase champion Geordie Beamish finished outside the medals in the men’s 3000m steeplechase at Scotstoun Stadium, and that two New Zealand lawn bowls teams missed out on medals under a sectional format that bowler Shannon McIlroy described as brutal after being knocked out despite losing only one game in his section.
None of that changes what happened in the breaststroke. Willmer went into a class above his own, swam to a plan, took nearly a second and a half off the man who ended up with bronze, and set a Games record for his classification while doing it. The disqualification changed the metal. It did not change the swim.
The Commonwealth Games in Glasgow run through to 8 August, with para-swimming, athletics, track cycling, netball and rugby sevens still to come for the New Zealand team.
What did you make of Josh Willmer’s swim, and should more para events be locked into the Commonwealth Games programme so athletes are not forced to race up a class? Leave a comment below and tell us what you think.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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