2024 World Aquatics Championships
Swimming has long ignored the economic realities of the sport. Sports essentially move from a “fitness” business to an “entertainment” business with a certain level of competition.
While there has been a wave of enthusiasm to change priorities in swimming and create a more fan-friendly atmosphere at collegiate, professional, and international competitions, the overwhelming majority of financial and professional incentives have gone to athletes, coaches, , and is pushing the federation towards focusing on the goals of competitive swimming. Three and a half years of opportunities were sacrificed for just one event, the Olympics.
Take, for example, the World Championships being held this week in Doha, Qatar. A total of $65,000 in prize money is available for each of the 42 swimming events, with the event winner receiving $20,000 and the eighth-place finisher receiving $2,000.
While top athletes like Katie Ledecky enjoy far more support than that, there are many athletes who are avoiding competitions to focus on their Olympic dreams — even if they don’t cost any money. Even though he could have earned five-figure compensation as a competitor — a full taper.
Much of the talk surrounding this event has focused on World Aquatics not prioritizing the needs of their athletes, but in some ways that’s exactly what they did. They found a way to force athletes to pay back $5.6 million from sponsors and organizers for a tournament that frankly doesn’t have the sparkle of most world championships.
But that’s not all they did.
They have given many mid-career athletes the opportunity to earn large sums of money through performance incentives that are often built into sponsorship deals and athlete funding programs.
Swimmers will win world championships that they probably never would have won otherwise. For a group of swimmers to win medals and earn a spot in the finals would not have been possible in any other year, and those agreements were probably written by someone with the assumption that they would never come to fruition. , the payoff can be significant. This event is the World Aquatics Championships, and many of those contracts did not take into account the possibility that an incomplete championship would offer the same prize money and historic spots as the 2023, 2022, and 2019 events. It would be.
That doesn’t mean the game was perfect or the circumstances were perfect. It’s frustrating to see the history of clean swimming interrupted. Adding a World Championship the week before the NCAA Conference Championship season begins will not enrich our lives and will not enrich our lives, nor will it benefit the college programs that make up the majority of World Championship participants and the world trying to prepare for it. Lord knows that it will not enrich the life of the coach inside. Athletes preparing for the upcoming Olympic trials.
But on the eve of the game, you can’t ignore the opportunity. Opportunities for athletes to make enough money to continue their careers, opportunities for publicity to raise the profile of more swimmers, this is what we need for professional leagues to be sustainable.
With the race about to begin, there is nothing to stop the competition or reschedule it. And I would never suggest that in the chaotic schedule resulting from the International Swimming League schedule, administrators ignored another opportunity that they have ignored time and time again: an opportunity to learn a lesson. However, the situation has worsened due to the catch-up after the COVID-19 pandemic. The same goes for the European Championships in June).
But the race begins now. The pool belongs to those who show up. This event is a major economic shake-up for swimming, which benefits everyone involved in the sport.
