Diogo Ribeiro world champion!

Benfica swimmer Diogo Ribeiro became world champion by winning the 50-meter butterfly final at the World Aquatics Championships on Monday, February 12, in Doha, Qatar.

Competing in lane 6, the 19-year-old (the youngest athlete in the race) completed the distance in 22.97 seconds, beating off competition from American Michael Andrew (23.07 seconds) and Australian Cameron McEvoy (23.08 seconds), who completed the podium.

In his first reactions to the historic achievement (Portugal's first gold medal at the World Championships), Diogo Ribeiro expressed his natural joy at the glorious outcome: "I have no words right now, but I'm very happy to be world champion!"

On the way to the final, the eagles' swimmer set the same time in the preliminaries and semi-finals (23.18 seconds), with the 5th and 4th best times in these stages respectively.

On Wednesday, February 14, Diogo Ribeiro will compete again in the 100-meter freestyle.

Describing the Benfica athlete's triumph as "exciting, exceptional and something out of this world", Mário Madeira, Benfica's swimming coordinator, praised the merit of this feat: "We have made a great effort for Diogo [Ribeiro] to have the best conditions, but this is something he deserves a lot. It's very good for Benfica, for swimming and for Portugal."

"It's a very fast race, difficult to get all the details right. He didn't start very well, but he gradually recovered and, at 25 meters, he was already in the lead group. He finished very well, he got the finish right, and that's what gave him the win by ten hundredths," said the red coordinator.