Lilly King, Ryan Murphy add new titles to gold collections at swimming worlds

BUDAPEST — Lilly King has now won gold in every breaststroke event in her world championships career. Ryan Murphy is now an individual world champion for the first time.

King won her first 200m breast title on Thursday, clocking 2 minutes, 22.41 at the Duna Arena. She prevailed by .63 of a second over Australian Jenna Strauch.

American Kate Douglass took bronze, a year after taking Olympic 200m individual medley bronze.

Murphy earned his biggest individual title since sweeping the backstrokes at the 2016 Olympics, taking the 200m back in 1:54.52, topping Brit Luke Greenbank by .64.

American Shaine Casas earned bronze in his first long-course world championships.

The U.S. added a third gold in the men’s 4x200m freestyle relay, a year after placing fourth in Tokyo, the first time the U.S. failed to make a relay podium in Olympic history.

King followed her breakthrough 2016 Olympic gold in the 100m breast with world titles in the 50m and 100m breast events in 2017 and 2019. In Tokyo, she earned bronze in the 100m and silver in the 200m.

South African Tatjana Schoenmaker, who broke the world record to win the Olympic 200m breast in Tokyo, skipped worlds to prioritize the Commonwealth Games later this summer.

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King, fourth in the 100m earlier this week, has been competing at 80 percent, said her coach in Indiana, Ray Looze, according to reports.

“She’s doing the best she can,” Looze said Tuesday after the 100m breast, according to the Indianapolis Star. “It doesn’t take a genius to kind of know what’s going on, given the world around us.”

King said after Wednesday’s semifinals that she was feeling better and expected that to continue for the rest of the meet.

She has one