Yumeki Kojima and 4:07.02: The Touch at Nagoya That Redraws Asia's 400 IM Map

The stand at the Aichi-Nagoya aquatics venue was so crowded that I stood for the entire final heat. The man next to me had been following Japanese swimming since the days Kosuke Hagino still raced; he said nothing through the first three hundred metres, only tapping his fingers on the railing in time with the strokes. When Yumeki Kojima touched the wall in lane four, he turned to me and said one sentence: "That kid swam it backwards." He was right about the feeling. Kojima had gone the wrong way around the script that the whole arena had loaded into their heads.

The board showed 4:07.02. Then came the line I had to read three times: a World Junior Record, an Asian Games record, and, in the lane next to him, the man he had just beaten was Tomoyuki Matsushita, the 2026 world No. 1 in the event, his senior on the national team, and the swimmer the Japanese press calls his mentor.

I once sat in a commentary booth at Toyota Stadium on 19 August 2026 and mispronounced a winger's name three times while the whole booth laughed. Nine years later, in the same Aichi region, I learned that a single touch of the wall can carry more layers than a ninetieth-minute goal. A 400m individual medley contains dozens of details, if you are calm enough to see them. This swim had at least seven that most of the crowd missed while they were cheering.

THE MATHEMATICS OF A MID-CYCLE YEAR

To understand why 4:07.02 matters, it has to sit in the right place on the calendar. 2026 is a mid-cycle year. There is no long-course World Championship. The Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya therefore become the season's peak target for an entire continental generation, and especially for the Japanese, who get to swim at home.

In other words, it is a meet where nations send their A-teams, but analysts still quietly discount the result when comparing it to an Olympic or World Championship final. An Asian Games gold does not automatically make someone an Olympic medal contender. But a World Junior Record broken at a home Games, under home pressure, in front of a home crowd, is a different story altogether.

What interests me most is not the time. It is how the time was produced. For more than a decade, Japan's men's 400 IM has been a continuous stream that has never run dry. Kosuke Hagino opened the era as Olympic champion and holder of the Asian Games record at 4:07.75 — a mark that stood for over a decade. Then came the next class, and then Tomoyuki Matsushita, who last month swam 4:05.83 to set a Japanese national record and take the world No. 1 ranking for the season.

So the picture before the final was clear: a 21-year-old senior, Olympic silver medallist, in the form of his life; and a 17-year-old junior who had just set a World Junior Record of 4:08.69 at Pan Pacifics and added a second World Junior Record in the 200m IM along with a silver medal.

Both wear the Japanese national team colours. That is what makes this story different from every other record story.

STARTING BY LETTING SOMEONE ELSE LEAD

In swimming, there are two ways to win a 400 IM. The first is to attack from the gun: empty the tank on butterfly and backstroke, build a psychological gap, then hang on through breaststroke and freestyle on willpower. The second is to let the opponent lead, hold your rhythm, and turn the last two legs into your own defensive line.

Kojima chose the second. And he chose it deliberately.

After the first two legs — butterfly and backstroke — he was behind. Not gone, not dropped, but exactly the kind of gap that a swimmer who knows he is strong on the back half can live with. He did not attack. He waited.

The turning point came on breaststroke. According to the original report, Kojima made up "major ground on the breaststroke" — the leg where he was supposedly weaker in both pedigree and power. I do not measure Mbappe's speed with radar; I measure it by the fear of defenders. With Kojima, I measure his strength by the ground he takes back from the current world No. 1.

In an event where Matsushita was rated higher on almost every technical count, erasing the gap on breaststroke is a powerful technical statement. Breaststroke is the strangest of the four legs: it is the only one whose speed is limited by the rulebook as much as by the body. You cannot swim breaststroke faster simply by pulling harder. You can only swim it faster by optimising the cycle, the shoulder angle, the breathing timing, and the number of kicks per cycle.

In other words, breaststroke is the leg least affected by maturation and muscle mass, and the one that demands the most technique. A 17-year-old beating a 21-year-old at peak form on that leg means the kid is not winning on strength. He is winning on craft.

This leads to a conclusion I believe matters more than the number 4:07.02 itself. Kojima is not a prodigy winning on biological explosion. He is a technical swimmer improving precisely on the leg where technique decides everything. For a 17-year-old, that is a far better signal than breaking a record on raw power — because the raw power of a 17-year-old has a ceiling, while technique does not.

26.85 SECONDS AND HOW A SWIMMER FINISHES

Now to the detail I consider the most undervalued in the entire swim: Kojima's final 50 metres was 26.85.

For readers who do not follow swimming closely, let me be blunt: a swimmer entering the last 50 of a 400 IM with a 26.85 is usually not fighting for survival. That is the posture of a man still in control of his race.

Set that beside another fact recorded in the same swim: the two leaders entered the freestyle leg essentially level. Kojima was not ahead. He was level. And yet over the final two legs he finished 2.62 seconds clear.

2.62 seconds in an event where two men are level entering the freestyle leg is not a narrow win. It is a race decided by closing speed that was still in reserve.

In sports physiology there is a concept I usually call, in plain language, "the controlled touch". A swimmer who finishes with energy left has not pushed their aerobic threshold to its limit in that swim. For Kojima, the 26.85 closing split, combined with being level before the freestyle leg began, shows the race was tightly paced rather than a gamble.

That has a direct consequence for forecasting. If he has headroom in the final 50, he has headroom in the whole swim. A swimmer who destroys themselves to break a record tends to stall at the next meet. A swimmer who controls a race to break a record tends to keep going.

A RECORD BUILT ON A DIFFERENT FOUNDATION

What I want to stress is that Kojima broke two records in the same season, in two different events: the 400 IM and the 200 IM. These are not physiologically similar. The 200 IM is a problem of speed, technique and transitions. The 400 IM is a problem of distributing energy across four legs and four transitions.

A swimmer who is only good at the 400 IM usually has a huge aerobic base but no top-end speed. A swimmer who is only good at the 200 IM usually has top-end speed but cannot hold intensity across four legs. Being good at both, at 17, means Kojima's profile is broader than either group.

That is why I place this swim not in the "one-off explosion" category but in the "curve validated across multiple meets" category. The proof is in his own progression: from 4:08.69 at Pan Pacifics to 4:07.02 at the Asian Games — a 1.67-second improvement inside a single season.

1.67 seconds. I want to pause here, because this is where many sports readers skim past.

For a 17-year-old male in a developmental phase, an improvement of more than 1.5 seconds in a season over a 400 IM is entirely plausible physiologically. It is not the number that makes you suspicious. It is the number that makes you nod. Suspicious time drops happen at 22 to 24, when the natural curve has flattened. At 17, the curve is still steep.

What is more notable lies elsewhere: the World Junior Record Kojima broke in Nagoya was his own. This is a detail most reports skip. It means he did not break someone else's record to become the holder. He already was the holder, and he pushed himself further. Analysts call this a single-line progressive record holder — the only person in history to have swum faster than himself at that age.

A COORDINATE ON THE MEN'S 400 IM MAP

To place 4:07.02 properly, I use four coordinates. The first is the world record. The current men's 400 IM world record belongs to Leon Marchand at 4:02.50. The gap between Kojima and the world-record line is roughly 4.5 seconds. To be clear: I take that figure from reference data outside the original report and it needs verification, but it gives a useful scale.

4.5 seconds in long-course swimming is a very large gap. For comparison, the margin between two swimmers in an Olympic final is usually measured in tenths. 4.5 seconds is the distance between a swimmer in the potential tier and one at the historic peak.

The second coordinate is the Asian Games record. Here Kojima did not merely break a record. He broke Kosuke Hagino's 4:07.75, a mark that had stood for over a decade. Kojima was 0.73 seconds faster. Breaking a national icon's record after more than ten years is not only a performance story; it is a generational handover signed by the scoreboard.

The third coordinate is the national list. 4:07.02 puts Kojima fourth on the all-time Japanese list for the event. At 17. I do not think that needs emphasis.

The fourth coordinate is the era. This is the detail I consider most important and least mentioned in Vietnamese coverage. The 4:07.02 was set in the textile era. Since 2026, polyurethane high-tech suits have been banned. That means every record set after 2026 can be compared directly without equipment inflation. Nothing stands behind 4:07.02 except the body, the technique and the stroke count of a 17-year-old.

That is why I place this swim in the first tier of potential, not yet the top tier of achievement. But for a 17-year-old, the distance between those tiers is a matter of time, not ability.

THE LESSON FROM A SWIMMER WITH A NAME BUT NOT ON THE BOARD

I want to tell a small story to illustrate how I read swims like this.

During the pandemic summer, when the Japanese football league was postponed indefinitely and stadiums stood empty, I lost my live commentary work. To keep my hand in, I rewatched the entire 2026 season and wrote a piece listing 47 details viewers had missed in a single match that finished 0-0. That piece taught me something I carried into swimming: silence is full of detail, and a sports writer has a duty to dig it up.

The pandemic taught me that the silence of an empty stand is also a symphony. In Nagoya the stands were not silent. They were roaring. And precisely because of that, the important details were easier to drown out.

The biggest drowned-out detail in this swim was the workload of the runner-up.

Matsushita did not only swim the 400 IM at these Asian Games. He swam the 200 IM — and won gold. He swam the 400 IM — and took silver. And more importantly, according to the original report, he anchored the men's 4x200m freestyle relay the night before the 400 IM final.

Read that again. The anchor leg. A relay. The night before.

In swimming, a relay is not a stroll. The anchor leg of a relay is the highest-intensity leg, because that is where placings are decided and nobody is allowed to save energy. A 21-year-old entering a 400 IM final after emptying himself on a relay anchor the previous night, on top of two individual events, is in what coaches call a stacked-load state.

And the result was 4:09.64 — 3.81 seconds slower than the 4:05.83 national record he had set himself the previous month.

This is where I part company with most international reports. Most will write: "17-year-old beats world No. 1." That is factually right and interpretively wrong.

The 2.62-second margin is not the true distance between Kojima and Matsushita under conditions where both are rested and fully prepared for a single swim. It is the distance between a man entering the final with an intact body and a man entering the final with three high-intensity swims in his legs.

I do not say this to diminish Kojima's win. I say it to calibrate expectations. Because if we read 2.62 seconds as a true gap, we will forecast both swimmers wrongly for the next two years.

There is a small companion detail worth recording: in the relay section, the original report mentions Japan trying to chase down a Chinese swimmer named Zhang. That single sentence shows that at the 2026 Asian Games, the men's 4x200m freestyle relay between Japan and China was a genuinely tense rivalry. And placing Matsushita on the anchor leg of that rivalry meant putting him in the highest-responsibility slot — at the cost of his individual final the following night.

That is nobody's fault. It was a coaching decision, and it may have traded a relay gold for an individual silver. But it shows that Kojima's win in Nagoya was a win with context, not an absolute one.

FOUR LEGS, FOUR DIFFERENT QUESTIONS

Every ball is a question, and I am the kind of person who loves finding the answer. In the 400 IM, the four legs are four consecutive questions a swimmer must answer in under four minutes.

The first question, on butterfly: do you have enough speed not to be dropped immediately? Kojima was behind after the first two legs. This is the only clearly recorded fact, and it must be read carefully.

There are two explanations for trailing early. The first: his front half is technically weaker, meaning his fly and back are less efficient than Matsushita's. The second: his front half is not weak, but he deliberately did not push it because he knew he was strong late.

The original report does not provide enough data to separate these. Only one split is given — the 26.85 final 50. Every other split is absent. That is the biggest limitation of the available data, and I must state clearly that any conclusion about Kojima's front half is inference rather than finding.

If I had to bet, however, I lean toward the second. The reason is specific: a swimmer with a 26.85 closing 50 is rarely technically weak early. If he has the reserve to close at that speed, the front-half issue is more likely distribution than capability.

This, I believe, will be the most important research question about Kojima over the next two years. If the front half is a technical weakness, he needs a technical change. If the front half is a tactical choice, he needs a stronger opponent to force him to abandon it. Those two scenarios lead to completely different training paths.

The breaststroke question: do you have a weapon? For Kojima, yes — proven by the fact that he closed ground on the world No. 1. His breaststroke is what I call the surge leg: the leg where most swimmers sit and wait, but he uses it to attack.

The freestyle question: how do you finish? Here Kojima answers with 26.85 and with the fact that he only led after being level through the previous two legs. In swimming, a man who enters the freestyle leg level and finishes 2.62 seconds clear owns one of the two most valuable things in the sport: top-end speed, or the ability to hold intensity when others fade.

The fourth question, not on the scoreboard: how do you handle four transitions? There is no data on this in the original report. In long-course swimming, each change of stroke is a chance to lose speed. There are four such moments in a 400 IM. If full splits become available later, I will look at how much time Kojima loses at each transition, because at 17, transition technique is taught rather than gifted.

WHAT CHANGES IF OPPONENTS READ THIS

Now I want to spend a section on what I consider Kojima's biggest tactical risk over the next 12 to 24 months. It flows directly from his own strength.

A swimmer whose winning model depends on accelerating on the back half runs into trouble the first day an opponent decides to push the front half beyond reach.

Imagine that scenario in a major final. The opponent swims fly and back at an unbelievable pace, opening a four-second gap through 200 metres. That gap must be paid for one of two ways: either Kojima breaks his own rhythm and swims the front half faster than his optimum, or he sticks to the plan and enters breaststroke four seconds down.

With breaststroke as a weapon, three seconds can be recovered. Four seconds starts to look fragile. Five seconds is essentially gone.

This is why I rank monitoring Kojima's front half ahead of monitoring his total time. At elite level, you do not keep winning by pressing your strengths forever. You win by keeping your weaknesses from being exploited before your strengths detonate.

There is another variable that complicates front-half development: physical maturation. At 17, the male body is still restructuring in muscle mass, density and buoyancy. These changes affect all strokes but affect them differently. Butterfly and freestyle depend more on shoulder strength and the ability to sustain stroke rate, so they benefit directly from added muscle mass. Breaststroke, by contrast, depends more on mechanical efficiency per unit of force, so added mass can backfire if technique is not adjusted in step.

Put simply: over the next two years, Kojima's body will help him on the front half and may hinder him on breaststroke. His front half will improve on its own. Breaststroke — his weapon — is what needs protecting.

That is the paradox anyone tracking Kojima should remember. People worry about a prodigy's weaknesses. Sometimes the thing that needs protecting is the strength.

THE "NEXT HAGINO" LABEL

By late 2026, when Kojima broke Hagino's record at a home Asian Games, one label will attach to him and it will be hard to remove for years: "the next Hagino".

I understand why. It has logic: same country, same event, same broken record, same junior age. Journalism needs a story, and the easiest story to sell is the succession story.

But the label has two serious analytical problems.

The first is memory. Hagino was not merely a record holder. He was a national icon who won medals on the biggest stages and was loved by a generation of Japanese fans. Once Kojima is placed in that frame, every step he takes is measured against another man's ruler. And that ruler has no units.

The second is trajectory. Hagino peaked at 21 or 22. Kojima is 17. If Kojima progresses on the normal curve of a male medley swimmer, his real peak may not arrive until 23 or 24. That means a five- or six-year window in which he has not yet achieved what Hagino achieved. And media, by nature, will call that a plateau instead of calling it what it is: development.

I have watched this mechanism operate. It operates in every sport. A young swimmer breaks a junior record, media call him the next legend, two years later he has not broken a national record, media call him a fallen prodigy. In both cases the media are wrong — because they are using a trajectory that does not exist to measure one that does.

The media fever will pass, but 26.85 seconds will remain in the bloodstream of everyone who stood in that Nagoya pool hall that night. That is why I write about this swim with data rather than adjectives.

WHAT INTERNATIONAL REPORTS WILL SAY AND WHAT THEY WILL MISS

A typical report on a World Junior Record follows a fixed structure: name, age, time, record broken, one quote, one line about the runner-up, done. That structure has a purpose: it serves readers who need speed.

But three things fast reports always miss — and those three things are what give the Nagoya swim its long-term value.

The first is the value of an intra-squad contest. When two swimmers in the same colours compete directly for an Olympic berth, a continental final becomes a signal about selection policy. Football calls it an internal war. Swimming calls it national trials — and in Japan, national trials are sometimes harder than a world final.

The second is the pacing structure. A report says "record". An analyst says "how the record was built". The distance between those two statements is the distance between news and forecast.

The third is schedule load. Matsushita anchored a relay the night before. That detail is in the original report, but it usually sits near the bottom, where readers skim past. For this event, it belongs right beside the 2.62-second figure.

When Vietnamese readers approach international sports news, these three omissions regularly cause misunderstanding. We read a record and assume it is a stable peak. In swimming, a record is a moment inside a sequence, and its value depends on whether the sequence is rising or flat.

With Kojima, the sequence is rising. From 4:08.69 to 4:07.02 in one season. That is the most important fact about him, and it matters more than the number 4:07.02 standing alone.

JAPAN'S TALENT STREAM AND WHAT IT MEANS

Japanese swimming has a talent stream in the men's 400 IM that very few Asian nations possess. The succession line reads: Kosuke Hagino opens the era, the next class holds the ground, Tomoyuki Matsushita rises to world No. 1, and now Yumeki Kojima at 17.

Four generations in one event. That is not luck. That is system.

Japan's talent development model differs fundamentally from the American one. The United States uses the collegiate system, where talent is raised on campus and competes on the intercollegiate circuit. Japan uses a corporate club plus university model, where swimmers typically attach to a club or training centre very early and develop along a long-term technical path.

The consequences for Kojima's story are concrete.

In the collegiate model, a talented 17-year-old often has to compete against older swimmers at the same school and tends to be pushed into racing more than necessary. In the Japanese club model, young swimmers are usually kept on a long-term path with controlled volume.

Add to that the fact that Kojima develops inside the same system as Matsushita — described as a mentor figure — and you get an advantage in technical transfer. In swimming, when a 17-year-old is learning, training alongside the world No. 1 is a coaching advantage measurable in how fast technique is absorbed. You have a model to watch every day. You have an opponent to test yourself against every session.

In elite swimming, the thing shared most is not the pool but the standard. A young swimmer training beside the world No. 1 is automatically pulled up to that standard without anyone telling him.

This is why I place Japan in the cluster-power category in the men's 400 IM rather than the overall-superpower category. They have an outstanding talent cluster in one specific event, with the leading swimmers separated by tenths rather than seconds.

And it is why, looking at the global map, I see a clear picture: Leon Marchand remains the absolute ruler, at a safe distance. Behind him is the challenger pack, and within that pack Japan is the deepest, most continuous bloc.

THE RISK OF A 17-YEAR-OLD WHO WINS

In sport we talk about the risk of the loser. Few talk about the risk of the young winner. That is the risk worth discussing here.

The first is physical. There is no injury information on Kojima in the original report, and I read that as a positive sign. But in a male 400 IM swimmer there is one occupational injury that needs continuous monitoring: swimmer's shoulder. The butterfly and freestyle volume required for a 400 IM loads the rotator cuff cumulatively. This is not a diagnosis. It is a watch item for anyone interested in Kojima's future.

The second is expectation. A 17-year-old breaking a World Junior Record at a home Games, in front of a home crowd, at a meet covered wall-to-wall by national media, is pushed into an accelerated expectation cycle. That cycle has a law: expectations rise faster than results. A year later, if Kojima has not broken another record, he will face plateau questions — asked by the same people who called him a future legend twelve months earlier.

The third is selection. This is the risk I consider most serious, and it is very specific to Japan. The men's 400 IM field there is brutally deep. Matsushita is world No. 1. Kojima is the fourth-fastest Japanese swimmer in history at 17. And in a selection system built on a single national trials meet, one bad morning on one day in one year can send a World Junior Record holder home to watch the Olympics on television.

In many countries that would be an unlikely scenario. In Japan it is a scenario that has already happened in other sports.

The fourth is front-half exploitation by rivals, analysed above. It is a purely tactical risk, rated medium, because to exploit Kojima's front half an opponent must be able to push the opening legs to a very high level — and only a handful of people in the world can do that.

Adding those four together, I rate the overall risk as medium. That is the typical risk profile of a rising young talent, not of a serious problem. There is no indication of doping, rule violation or eligibility issues anywhere in this story. The record was ratified. That is the clearest legal proof that the swim was legitimate.

THE LIMITS OF SWIMMING AND THE LIMITS OF US

There is something I always think about when I watch swimming, and it became clearer after I moved from football commentary to covering track, pool and field events.

Football can last 90 minutes plus stoppage, and inside those 90 minutes are hundreds of small decisions. Swimming is different. A 400 IM lasts a little over four minutes, and inside those four minutes are roughly eighty freestyle arm cycles, twelve to fourteen breaststroke kicks, thousands of dolphin and flutter kicks. Yet the final outcome is measured by a single number.

That compression has a strange consequence. It makes swimming the sport closest to athletics emotionally, and the easiest to misread analytically. Viewers remember the time, not the process.

When Karsten Warholm broke the men's 400m hurdles world record with 45.94 at the Tokyo Olympic Stadium in 2026, I screamed myself hoarse in the commentary booth. I then spent two hours writing, and I worked with a sports physicist to explain why holding thirteen strides between hurdles is a perfect equation. That series taught me something: a record only becomes meaningful when you can explain the mechanism behind it.

With Kojima, the mechanism sits in three places. First, a front half deliberately held back. Second, a breaststroke leg used as an attacking weapon. Third, a closing sprint with reserve left. Add those three together and you have a technical profile any coach would want.

That is why I do not view 4:07.02 as the end of a story. I view it as a beginning, recorded in a number.

COUNTERARGUMENT: ARE WE MEASURING THE WRONG THING?

At this point I want to argue against myself, because an analysis that does not self-critique is propaganda.

There is another reading of the whole event, and it is entirely reasonable: that we are paying too much attention to the 4.5-second gap to the world record, when the thing that really matters sits somewhere else entirely.

That reading says: in swimming, a 17-year-old does not need to approach the world record to be valuable. What he needs is a continuously rising curve. Kojima has that curve. From 4:08.69 to 4:07.02. From one World Junior Record at one meet to another World Junior Record at another meet. That is a curve drawn by two independent data points at two independent competitions.

And if that is the only thing we know about him, it is still enough to place him among the top talents of his age group.

I agree with that reading, up to a point. But I would add this: a curve only has value when it is drawn by performances under comparable conditions. Kojima's 4:07.02 came in a final where his main rival had just come through three high-intensity swims, which makes the second data point weaker than it looks.

In other words, both readings are valid. Which means that until Kojima enters a final against a fully prepared opponent, we are still in the zone of insufficient data.

That is why I always tell people who follow young athletes: watch the next twelve months, do not conclude in the next twelve days.

FOUR SIGNALS TO WATCH OVER THE NEXT TWO YEARS

If I had to pick four signals to track on Kojima over the next two years — and I believe anyone interested in Asian swimming should track them — they would be these.

First, the front-half splits. I want to know exactly how far behind he is at 100m and 200m. If that gap narrows over time, it is a serious positive signal, because it means he is building both halves without losing his late weapon. If the gap holds steady while total time keeps dropping, it means his back half is becoming extraordinarily strong — also good, but with higher tactical risk.

Second, consistency across meets. One record is news. Three swims under 4:08 at three different competitions is a trend. For a young swimmer, the thing that separates those who go far from those who stall is repeatability.

Third, Matsushita's comeback. If Matsushita rests, recovers and then returns to swim around 4:06 at a properly prepared meet, the 2.62-second margin in Nagoya will have to be re-read in a completely different light — and that is fair to both swimmers.

Fourth, Japan's selection process for the Los Angeles 2028 cycle. If their trials system remains single-meet based, then the risk of a World Junior Record holder being left out is real, and it matters more than how fast he swims.

A BRIDGE BETWEEN TEACHERS

There is one small detail in this story I want to close on, because it is the detail that makes me believe in Kojima's future more than any number.

He develops inside the same system as the man he just beat. The press calls Matsushita his mentor. That is not a sentimental detail. It is a fact about training structure.

In sport, great eras are rarely built by one talented individual. They are built by a stream. One teaches, one learns, and then the learner becomes the teacher. Hagino left a record. Matsushita broke it. Kojima broke the record Hagino left behind. And if the stream continues, the next one will break the record Kojima leaves behind.

That is the nature of a swimming power. Not one great swimmer. A stream that does not break.

The fall at Toyota was not a stop; it was the starting block of a different way of telling a story. I sat in that booth with a name I mispronounced three times, and I learned that the smallest details are the only things left when the cheering stops.

In Nagoya, what remained after the cheering stopped was 26.85 seconds, a 2.62-second margin built by a man who still had energy left, a 17-year-old standing fourth in his country's history, and a 21-year-old senior entering a final on legs that had not yet recovered.

I do not write to conclude; I write to open small doors in your head. If you read only one line about this swim, I hope it is this one: the distance between a young talent and the world No. 1 is usually not on the clock; it is on the schedule. And over the next two years, when those two Japanese men step onto a pool deck with fresh legs, we will learn the real number.