LAUSANNE, Switzerland, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) — A complete of 16 world data had been shattered within the pool in 2023, as World Aquatics restructures aquatic sports activities for a brand new look and a brighter future.
According to World Aquatics, 11 girls’s, three males’s, one blended relay, and one short-course (25m) world data had been damaged in 2023.
After the previous FINA was renamed World Aquatics one yr in the past, the world swimming governing physique has been internet hosting extra high-level competitions, making main modifications to the scoring guidelines of inventive swimming, and introducing new occasions to raise the usual of the competitions.
Under the administration of Husain Al-Musallam, who was elected president throughout the FINA General Congress in 2021, the World Championships is to proceed to be held yearly till at the least 2025.
“We’ve tried to reduce the number of events since new president Husain Al-Musallam came in. We believe in something like smaller-bigger-better, or we say smaller events, smaller calendar, bigger events and better delivery of our events,” mentioned Pere Miro, sports activities director of World Aquatics, in a current interview.
As defined by Miro, the World Cups have been decreased from eight stops to 3 for swimming, from six to 3 for diving, and from 9 to 4 for inventive swimming.
The World Championships was a biennial occasion till 2019. It was held in Budapest in 2022, in Fukuoka, Japan in 2023, and can be held in Doha, Qatar in 2024 and in Singapore in 2025.
“The impression of people is we’re having a lot of competitions, and having the World Championships every year,” Miro mentioned.
“We couldn’t organize the events in the way that we planned to because of the COVID effect. So we tried to shrink the calendar. It gives the feeling that these are back-to-back World Championships.”
A compacted schedule of world-level competitions has produced extra optimistic outcomes prior to now two years.
“I think, honestly, it’s positive for us because it has raised our profile, and it has raised the awareness of what aquatic sports are worldwide,” Miro remarked.
Artistic swimming can be a brand-new occasion on the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, with a crew acrobatic routine added to this system, enabling male inventive swimmers to compete within the sport for the primary time in Olympic historical past.
FINA made a dramatic change to the scoring system of inventive swimming in October 2022, main to an enormous impression on the game, which can grow to be quicker, stronger, clearer and fewer predictable.
“We changed completely the scoring system [of artistic swimming] and we made it very objective in the sense that now it’s a little bit closer to diving. We turned what used to be very subjective into something very objective,” Miro mentioned.
“It’s very difficult to rate art from 1 to 10. So there was thought that we subjectively evaluated the performance. But we said ‘No.’ We need to be objective. If the position of the body needs to be in this way, this is the standard and the more you deviate from that one way, the more we deduct from the score,” he added.
A technical management panel has been added to the judging crew to guage the difficulties of the routine. “We want to make the sport more dynamic and powerful, while also keeping the artistry in there. So I think there are more lifts involved in the complexity of the movements, pushing it further and further, advancing the sport a lot. This makes people challenge themselves that way,” World Aquatics’ communication supervisor Torin Koos mentioned.
As excessive diving is the one self-discipline on the present World Aquatics Championships program not included within the Olympic Games, World Aquatics continues to attempt to incorporate excessive diving within the Olympics. With a broader imaginative and prescient for aquatic sports activities in thoughts, they’re additionally exploring new fields like seashore water polo.
There are some everlasting seashore water polo courts in Spain and Italy, however the sport remains to be missing in laws and tournaments.
“It’s like the start of 3×3 basketball, and we’re trying to do the same thing, to make it more accessible and easier for the spectators to understand. It’s our intention. It’s growing a lot,” Miro famous.