KEY POINTS:
Commonwealth Games champion Moss Burmester is into tonight's final of the 200m butterfly at the world championships in Melbourne.
He finished second in his semifinal, clocking 1min 56.27s, eclipsing the old mark of 1min 56.64s he set in winning his Games title in Melbourne last year.
It qualified him fifth fastest for the final, and marked him as a realistic medal hope.
American Michael Phelps, fresh from breaking Ian Thorpe's 200m freestyle world record earlier in the night, qualified fastest for the final with a time of 1min 55.13s in the second semifinal.
It was more than a second outside his own 200m butterfly world record set last year.
China's Yin Chen won Burmester's heat in 1min 56.04s, with Burmester 0.03s ahead of defending champion Pawel Korzeniowski of Poland, who finished third.
Burmester, who was 10th fastest in the morning heats, was always prominent and led at the halfway point before being overhauled by a late charge from Chen.
There were three gold medals for Americans early in the finals session.
Natalie Coughlin won the 100m backstroke title in 59.44s, breaking her own world mark set in 2002 by 0.14s; Phelps took the 200m freestyle in 1min 43.86s; and Aaron Piersol became the first backstroker to go under 53s in winning the 100m title in 52.98s.
And Italian Federica Pellegrini set a world mark of 1min 56.47s for the 200m freestyle in the semifinals last night. She wiped 0.17s off the previous record German Franziska van Almsick set in 2002.
