FORUM: Own Goal Trophy For 2025 To World Aquatics Leaders In Need Of A Lighthouse
Our last award for the 2025 season goes to the global regulator for swimming. It's not a plaudit but a storm-warning to a federation showing all the hallmarks of not only sliding back into the ways of old FINA but taking the sport into far more perilous waters
Thema: Reform On The Rocks
When FINA engaged Olympic legal eagle and Swiss lawyer François Carrard to lead a Reform Committee in June 2021 with a view to it making recommendations for change in an organisation that wanted to leave its bad habits and culture behind, there was good cause for hope.
Not so much now...
Before the state of swimming ...a reminder... to all: if you have time, this video is stacked with the sort of questions swimming leaders should ask on a continuous basis if they are serious about integrity, transparency, good governance and 'reform':
REFORM - what it looks like if we're serious - cross-party
FIFA changed - but not for the best, not in any meaningful way in key regards, as its current boss shows us on a regular basis.
Words v deeds. 'Reform' remains a goal we think sports leaders are serious about - the words are buzz words, no more - which in swimming means that this version of reform we see, regardless of the list of positive moves, is not reform at all when it comes to the deep governance that will shape the sport's future in a competitive sector. Listen to the full session in the video above and imagine that kind of scrutiny in swimming, a sport that cannot rely on mass, global popularity and a vast economic market in which just one football team's combined wages alone far outstrip the entire annual income of World Aquatics.
