Today, FINA announced that the 2013 World Championships bid will be voted on and re-awarded at the upcoming 1st annual FINA World Aquatics Convention in Punta del Este, Uruguay (the home nation of current FINA president Dr. Julio Maglione). Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, was originally selected as the host city, but withdrew for a number of reasons. Read about that story here.
The process, which will be significantly shortened compared to what is typically held, will begin with a briefing to all interested cities this Thursday, July 22nd. After that briefing, any federations that are still interested will have until the convention, which runs September 25th-29th.
The 2011 Championships are to be held in Shanghai, China, which has some fantastic facilities in the works.
The other 6 finalists previously in the running for the 2013 were Belgrade, Serbia; Budapest & Belatonfured, Hungary; Hamburg, Germany; Honk Kong; Madrid, Spain; and Moscow, Russia. The bidding has been reopened to all competitors, however, and there has been no indication yet whether any of these cities will choose to bid again.
Where would you like to see the World Championships go? Out of the previous finalists, I would like to see them in Madrid, which built a fabulous new National Aquatics Center as part of it’s bid for the 2016 Olympics. That facility will be completed in 2011, and is world-class in every sense of the term.
Outside of those finalists, my preference would be South Africa. They did a fantastic job running the most recent soccer World Cup, which is a scale that the World Championships don’t even come close to, as well as successful Swimming World Cups in host cities like Durban. With World-Class swimmers like Roland Schoeman and Cameron van der Burgh somehow slipping under the radar of the swimming community, this would be a great opportunity to show how far swimming on the African continent has come.
Out of the 6 previous finalists, with whom the committee is likely most familiar and comfortable with, only Madrid has previously hosted a World Championship meet, which was in 1986. Spain also hosted the 2003 event in Barcelona. The German federation has previously hosted the second World Championships in Berlin, West Germany all the way back in 1978. The 2009 meet, which saw so many records broken, was enormous compared to those meets, however, and at 2556 swimmers was the biggest yet. The previous record was the 2007 meet with 2158 swimmers. The 1986 event in Madrid had 1119 athletes, the 2003 event in Barcelona had 2015 athletes, and the 1978 games had a mere 828 participants, so aside from Barcelona, none were nearly on the scale of what the 2013 event will be.