The next 24 months will feature three World Aquatics Championships in long course (plus at least one more in short course) in the leadup to the Paris Olympic Games. This is part of an international event crush like we’ve never seen before in the history of the sport.
Swimmers, especially Australian swimmers, are already making their choices to chase Commonwealth glory ahead of the 2022 World Championships, with superstars like Emma McKeon and Kyle Chalmers both announcing that they won’t be in Budapest this summer.
But the expectation of a bigger mass exodus comes for the oddly rescheduled January 2024 World Championships in Doha. That meet will come within a year of the postponed Fukuoka World Championships in 2023, and within a few months of the start of most countries’ selection processes for the Olympic Games.
So how can FINA motivate countries to still send full roster to the Doha World Championships and swim fast once they arrive?
I’ve got three ideas.
1. More Prize Money
The most obvious answer is and continues to be adding more prize money. Athletes love prize money, fans love prize money, federations love prize money – everyone loves prize money. This has worked for FINA in the past – they had good participation at the FINA Champions Series, and it really seemed to work at the 2018 World Short Course Championships. But we live in a very different world now, and between the COVID-19 pandemic and the political warring with the ISL, plus what seems to be some general competition fatigue among athletes, that practice was less effective in 2021. By 2024, we don’t really know whether the ISL will still exist or what it will look like, especially with the potential damage to the financial situation of Ukrainian billionaire owner Konstantin Grigorishin, but for now, this is the most straightforward solution that lacks any real creative thought (which has never proven to be a strength in Lausanne).
2. Olympic Relay Qualification
The next most-obvious carrot is by keeping Olympic relay qualifications at the World Championships that immediately proceed the Olympic Games, which in this case would be Doha 2024. Traditionally, the top 12 finishing nations at the pre-Olympic World Championships in each relay receive an automatic bid to the Olympic Games. They are then supplemented by the next 4 best from the relevant qualifying period.
This motivates countries in two ways: not only to send their best athletes, but to make sure they’re in good form. As the world gets deeper, even superpowers like the U.S. and Australia can’t assume a coast into a top 12 position with a half roster anymore.
This assumes that countries still care about relay qualifications. More-and-more, we see top swimmers from lesser swimming nations skip out on relay events, and in Tokyo, we saw a number of qualified countries pass on relays if they didn’t think those relays would finish high enough to warrant the effort. I hate that. As the father of the modern Olympics Pierre de Coubertin said in 1896:
“The important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win, but to take part; the important thing in life is not the triumph, but the struggle; the essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.”
We’ve lost sight of that in a lot of ways in sport, and I hope that this Olympic relay thing doesn’t become the latest victim.
3. More Athletes Per Country
This one would take the most logistics, coordination, and novel thought, but here’s a wild idea: expand event rosters to 3 or 4 athletes per country. This could be done using the European Championships practice where maybe only 2 per country could advance to the semifinals.
What’s cool about this idea is that, with the opportunity to bring more athletes, you might see some countries actually incorporate the World Championships into their Olympic qualifying processes. Probably not countries like the US and Australia that rely on last-minute one-shot qualification meets, but for lots of European and Asian and South American nations that already use multi-meet qualifying, allowing some more flexibility for countries that want to incorporate the pressure of an international meet with the purpose of a selection meet.
Ultimately, I think FINA is going to have to do something differently to make the 2024 World Championships interesting for athletes. At a minimum, it’s an opportunity to try something and reinvigorate some enthusiasm for the event. At the end of the day, it’s a loop between them and the federations: they need federation buy-in to try something, and the federations need FINA’s leadership to have confidence that the meet will work.
This is a unique opportunity that undoubtedly provides a lot of challenges, but it also provides a lot of opportunities to push the sport in the future. Let’s hope that someone steps forward to take advantage.
A lot of FINA officials could step down. They are also part of the problem.
They think less of athletes and more of their back pocket
Yeah, the problem is that they all just stepped down (or were told to step down).
It’s a whole new crew, but they seem to operate basically the same way as the old crew. Maybe a little less old, but still a lot of the same bureaucratic nonsense so far.
I really liked adding extra athletes per country, until I just thought – that’d make prelims a dang bloodbath, won’t it?
Not that it’s not all getting pretty fast nowadays anyway, but if you’re not only vying for top 16 but top 2 from your own nation that’ll really make for some nutso morning swims where a single country is insanely stacked. (Like, US women’s 100 back, or Australian women’s 100 free.)
He might also have Some Takes on who’s taking part in let’s say…half of the events that are currently on the program, though.
*make Doha the 2022 SC worlds host, killing two birds with one stone
When will FINA announce (or not announce) a potential World Juniors alternative site to Russia?
It took about two weeks for the eventual Budapest announcement for Worlds …….
Ideally,, I’d say “can it” and return to normal scheduling post Paris but FINA is unlikely to do so.
In all honesty, barring threats of Olympic exclusion, you are not going to see most top guns appear in Doha so my thoughts are rather “how can we make this meet serve some constructive purpose” ?
- Rather than make this the relay qualification meet (rather than 2023 Worlds); make this the “last chance saloon for the remaining relay slots.
- make this the qualification spot for the “Universality Places” in the various events
- otherwise, restrict it to the non-Olympic 50m events giving those 50 specialists (who will not realistically make their teams in longer events) a spotlight they may not have
… Read more »I’m not sure any of those are even good solutions. They’d encourage lots of entries from Guinea and Guatemala, but which one of those are going to encourage Americans and Australians and Brits and Hungarians and Italians to participate?
The hard reality is that, bar holding the whip of Olympic exclusion over their head, you will not see major “guns” in Doha. End of story.
Hence, I put forward ways of trying to make the meet serve some meaningful purpose. Maybe jiggling the relay qualification around that only the top 8 (rather than 12) from 2023 automatically qualify and making Doha “last chance saloon” may see a few names front for this …. maybe not. Braden’s point 2 has some mileage but I’m not sure making Doha the “one shot” relay qualification for everyone is necessarily the way to go given how “out of season’ this meet will be. Mine is, admittedly, a compromise.
Braden’s extended numbers with… Read more »
You call #2 a “carrot” but it’s really a “stick”. It’s threatening the top countries (let’s be honest, mostly Australia) that if they don’t send a proper team to World Champs that it will cost them Olympic medals.
I’ve been a proponent of additional entries for countries for years. Simple option is return to 3 per country like track and like it used to be in the 70s. But the standard for the 3rd entry should be very fast as in medal potential, or top 8 or so ranking, a FINA “C” standard or something. It would only add a few US, Aussie, Japan/Canada female swimmers to the meet, but each event would have ‘the best’. Semis would beat dog right in many events! Could then make semis like track, top 2 or 3 auto in, then next fastest combined to round out final.
Other options, world rank system as mentioned, similar to professional golf, tennis, track even.… Read more »
I actually quite like this. I don’t agree with more than two entries in the Olympics, but I would be ok with it for World Champs.
I don’t really agree with automatic entry for particular events. NCAAs is almost all American, a lot of the other events are region or nation specific. Just because someone wins an event at NCAAs or University Games or Asian Games doesn’t automatically mean they are world class level.