China's Xinyang Zhou broke the Girls 100m Fly 15-17 meet record on the opening morning in Bangkok, while Singapore posted two age-group podium finishes and Malaysia's squad chipped away at seed times across the fly, IM and freestyle prelims.
The 12th Asian Age Group Championships opened this morning in Bangkok with six individual prelim sessions — fly, freestyle and IM, boys and girls — and one meet record didn't survive the water. Here's how the opening session played out, with a closer look at how Malaysia and Singapore's swimmers fared.
The morning's standout swim came in the Girls 100m Butterfly, where China's Xinyang Zhou touched in 59.86 in the 15–17 age tier — inside the old meet record of 1:00.50, set by Hong Kong's Hoi Ching Yeung in 2024. It was the only meet record to fall across the six individual events swum this morning, with the 18+ and 12–14 tier marks in fly, free and IM all standing.
Singapore produced the region's two standout age-group results of the morning. In the Boys 400m Freestyle, Dylan Jian Hong Lee touched second in the Group C field with 4:12.17, while in the Boys 200m IM, Dylan Wu qualified third with 2:15.48 — both swimmers moving into their respective age-group finals in top-three position, with medals still to be decided this evening.
Malaysia's morning was defined less by placings than by sharp drops off seed time, led by the Group A boys' fly pair of Abdul Karim Jaafar Azhar (58.64 seed → 57.43) and Kee Kean Yoong (58.62 seed → 57.46), both taking well over a second off their entry marks in the Boys 100m Fly. In the pool's longer races, Elizabeth Yi Wen Chan was the biggest mover of the morning across both nations, cutting 7.5 seconds from her 400m Free seed time to finish in 4:52.17.
Not every swim went to plan over the longer freestyle events — a Prelims session at a meet this size inevitably produces a spread of results, and both squads had swimmers finish outside their seed times in the 400m Free heats. With Finals still to come and five more days of racing ahead, this morning's session was a first look at form rather than the full picture.
Day 1 Finals follow this afternoon at the SAT Swimming Pool, Rajamangala National Stadium in Bangkok, with the 12th Asian Age Group Championships continuing through 21 July 2026. Full heat sheets, live results and photos from each session are available on the Heat Check and Gallery sections of the briefing page.