LAUSANNE, Switzerland, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- A total of 16 world records were shattered in the pool in 2023, as World Aquatics restructures aquatic sports for a new look and a brighter future.
According to World Aquatics, 11 women's, three men's, one mixed relay, and one short-course (25m) world records were broken in 2023.
After the former FINA was renamed World Aquatics one year ago, the world swimming governing body has been hosting more high-level competitions, making major changes to the scoring rules of artistic swimming, and introducing new events to elevate the standard of the competitions.
Under the administration of Husain Al-Musallam, who was elected president during the FINA General Congress in 2021, the World Championships is to continue to be held annually until at 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," said Pere Miro, sports director of World Aquatics, in a recent interview.
As explained by Miro, the World Cups have been reduced from eight stops to three for swimming, from six to three for diving, and from nine to four for artistic swimming.
The World Championships was a biennial event until 2019. It was held in Budapest in 2022, in Fukuoka, Japan in 2023, and will 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 said.
"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 more positive results in the past 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 will be a brand-new event at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, with a team acrobatic routine added to the program, enabling male artistic swimmers to compete in the sport for the first time in Olympic history.
FINA made a dramatic change to the scoring system of artistic swimming in October 2022, leading to a massive impact on the sport, which will become faster, stronger, clearer and less 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 said.
"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 control panel has been added to the judging team to evaluate 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 manager Torin Koos said.
As high diving is the only discipline on the current World Aquatics Championships program not included in the Olympic Games, World Aquatics continues to strive to include high diving in the Olympics. With a broader vision for aquatic sports in mind, they are also exploring new fields like beach water polo.
There are some permanent beach water polo courts in Spain and Italy, but the sport is still lacking in regulations and tournaments.
"It's like the start of 3x3 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 noted. ■
