Tymon Kolasiński

Tymon Kolasiński: The Cuber Who Beat Thirty Seconds

On 1 May 2026, in the first round of a regional competition called All Rounders Katowice I, a 20-year-old Pole picked up a 5x5x5 Rubik's Cube, started the timer, and became the first person in the puzzle's history to solve it in under thirty seconds. It was not a fluke or a one-off stunt. By then Tymon Kolasiński had spent seven years methodically demolishing the record book of competitive cubing, and the sub-30 barrier was simply the next wall to fall.

A Pyraminx Champion at Fourteen

Kolasiński was born on 21 June 2005 in Poland, and he announced himself on the world stage early. At the 2019 WCA World Championship, the sport's biggest event, he won the Pyraminx event outright, posting an average solve time of 2.40 seconds. That title, won as a teenager, put him on the radar of a discipline whose top ranks are usually the preserve of solvers with a decade of practice behind them.

Toppling Max Park

The defining rivalry of modern speedcubing has been Kolasiński's slow, methodical assault on the records held by American star Max Park, long considered the sport's dominant figure in the flagship 3x3x3 and 5x5x5 events. On 19 December 2021, at a competition called Cubers Eve Lubartów, Kolasiński broke Park's 3x3x3 world record average with a time of 5.09 seconds. He then broke his own mark the following year at an event called Cube4fun in Warsaw, bringing the average down to 4.86 seconds. Weeks later, at the Rubik's WCA European Championship 2022, he achieved his first-ever official 3x3x3 solve under four seconds in competition — a threshold that separates the merely elite from the historically fast.

The 2023 World Championship

By 2023, Kolasiński had expanded his ambitions beyond the 3x3x3 cube that made his name. At that year's World Championship he was crowned world champion in both the 4x4x4 and 6x6x6 events, finished as runner-up in the 5x5x5 and 7x7x7 events, and still managed third place in the marquee 3x3x3 event — a spread of results that marked him as one of the rare cubers competitive across every major puzzle size simultaneously, not just a specialist in one.

Sweeping Europe, Rewriting 5x5x5

2024 was a season of near-total European dominance: Kolasiński won the 3x3x3, 4x4x4, 5x5x5 and 6x6x6 events at the European Championship, a clean sweep across four separate disciplines in a single tournament. That September, at a competition called DuPage Fall 2024, he posted a 5x5x5 single solve of 31.60 seconds, breaking Max Park's world record in that event as well. The following year he did it again: on 5 July 2025, at the Rubik's WCA World Championship 2025, he set a new 5x5x5 average-of-five world record at 34.31 seconds, again eclipsing Park, while still finishing third in the 3x3x3 event with a 4.98-second average. The pattern was becoming familiar — Kolasiński treating the 5x5x5 world record not as a peak to reach once, but as a number he intended to keep lowering.

Under Thirty Seconds

That is exactly what happened in May 2026. At All Rounders Katowice I, he broke both the 5x5x5 single and average world records in the same round, becoming the first competitor ever to solve the puzzle in under thirty seconds at a sanctioned event. As of that point his personal bests stood at a 29.49-second single and a 33.73-second average, alongside a 4x4x4 single of 15.18 seconds set earlier at the Spanish Championship 2025.

By the Numbers

The scale of Kolasiński's career resists easy summary, so the World Cube Association's own ledger tells it best: as of 8 May 2026, he had won 488 individual events at official WCA competitions and broken 16 world records, 61 European records, and 48 Polish national records. In the 3x3x3 event alone — the sport's most competitive and most closely timed — his average of 4.62 seconds ranks seventh all-time, in company with Xuanyi Geng, Yiheng Wang, Yufang Du, Bofang Zhang, Teodor Zajder and Zhaokun Li, a list that functions as competitive cubing's current summit. Off the cube, he has built a YouTube channel with more than 99,000 subscribers, documenting his practice and competition results for an audience that has grown alongside his record count.

Why Tymon Is Called a Genius

No source describes Kolasiński in those terms directly, and it is worth being precise about what his achievement actually is before reaching for the word. Speedcubing genius, to the extent the label fits, is not mathematical insight or creative originality in the way those words are used for a physicist or a composer. A 5x5x5 solve under thirty seconds is a feat of trained motor memory: thousands of hours spent internalizing algorithms — fixed sequences of moves — until the fingers execute them faster than conscious thought can track, combined with the pattern recognition needed to identify, in a fraction of a second, which of dozens of memorized sequences a given cube state requires. It is closer to the genius of a concert pianist's fingers than a mathematician's insight — extraordinary, but built from repetition and refinement rather than a single flash of original thought. The honest counter-case is straightforward: nothing in Kolasiński's record suggests he invented new solving methods or theory: his achievement is the ruthless, incremental optimization of existing techniques, executed at a physical speed almost no one else on earth can match. That is a real and rare form of mastery. It is a different thing from intellectual originality, and the record books that track him — world records, not theorems — reflect exactly that distinction.

Legacy

Kolasiński's career is still being written in real time, each new competition another chance to lower a number he has already lowered before. But the shape of his legacy is already visible: a Polish teenager who arrived as a Pyraminx champion in 2019, methodically dismantled the records of the sport's reigning American star through the early 2020s, and by 2026 stood as the only person to have ever broken thirty seconds on the 5x5x5 cube — a line in the sport's history that will carry his name for as long as the record stands.