A few major competitions for international masters swimmers have been cancelled or postponed due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
While vaccines are being distributed worldwide, event organizers globally are still trying to figure out how events with massive participant numbers can be held safely for both the competitors and the local communities they’re competing in. This follows in the wake of scheduling issues and cancellations for multiple Olympic qualifiers recently.
The 2021 European Masters Championships have been canceled, with the swimming portion of the meet supposed to run at the end of May in Budapest. The meet was originally going to be held in 2020, but was moved to 2021 due to COVID-19, and it’s now been canceled altogether.
The UANA Pan American Masters Championships have been postponed, not canceled, pushed to July 21-28 of 2022 in Medellin, Colombia. They were initially slated for May 2021.
Meanwhile, the 2022 FINA World Masters Championships is going to be split into three different sites. The meet will function out of Fukuoka, Kumamoto and Kagoshima in Japan between May 31 and June 9, 2022. Like the UANA Pan Am Masters, the meet was originally set for 2021 but will now be pushed an entire year.
Plus there are essentially no local masters meets while there have been a lot of USA meets. USMS needs to start having meets again now that vaccinations are becoming widespread.
You can go to Disneyland instead of a swim meet.
Disneyland was the plan after the session.
They’ve released guidelines and actually went to Phase 2 of meet sanctioning requirements yesterday. But it’s up to the LMSCs and clubs to do the hosting and a lot of them are still on the conservative side of things – let alone finding facilities.
Also, it’s tough for even midsize LMSCs to get enough people to hold a meet right now – I’m in Ozark, our biggest meet gets around 50 people and much less than we can’t really afford the rental fees for the pool.
Sounds like Arkansas. Well, Arkansas gets some seniors to relocate not as much as Florida or Arizona. Florida gets New Yorkers and Arizona Californians. In fact some parts of the south have taken off like South Carolina. Both Jenny Thompson and Steve Gregg ex=swimming Olympians live now in South Carolina.
Please go ahead and organize one.
Remembering that the USMS is a member driven organization, the member’s interests and safety can determine the scheduling of any gatherings and meets in due time.