FORUM: What Happened To The Swim In Swimbledon?
Part 3 - Swimming's Search For Growth. It's ten years since SwimVortex published a vision headlined "Great Day Out At Swimbledon At The Dawn of a Golden Era for Professional Swimmers". Every bit as relevant today
Essay: Some dawns are false, others lead to much brighter days. My feature from 2016, reproduced below, suggested a fictional world in which swimming had reached for a better way of paying professional fees to athletes by and while selling itself to the vast audience that tunes in once every four years, or every two, to a lesser extent, if you count World long-course Championships as 'the other peak' in a range dominated by Olympic Heights.
Here's how I started in 2016:
“... after considering the woeful state of the World Cup costing a glance at one of the biggest battlegrounds ahead, access to decision-making, we looked at what's not worked. Why and what might be done about it if the sports want to lay the foundations of something better."
"That includes understanding swimming seasons, while recognising that the sport is not, and cannot be a sport for all seasons in the way that tennis basketball, baseball, football and other pro sports.
Swimming is unique. Some believe that that means a once-every-four-years sport, at best (and at the best it will ever be), no need for much in between beyond the world long-course showcase championships held every two years since 2001 and something called the World Cup.
The latter, some believe, is still the best way of organising a regular tour-style gathering of top swimmers from across the globe - and they believe that even if, as is the case, the bulk of world-class programs don't go there, the series bypassed by the vast majority of the best in the world, the cup a campaign of a relative few world-class acts - some appearing in the same events and making a stab at the big prize pot, if we're lucky.
SwimVortex is aware that swimmers have been discussing what to do about the unhappy state of their 'in-season but no real-season-to-speak-of beyond the biggest of championships (and even then, hardly the constant we find in other sports).
Heartening news that swimmers are taking about it - and exchanging ideas with their peers , and in some cases, their coaches, too. Long may it continue, for those are the folk who must ultimately own change, move change, and work for a professional future that will not be delivered through any of the vehicles currently available to them, nor be delivered by governors beyond the confines of 'what's in it for our [not your] organisation and our ambition to stay, generation of swimmer come and go, regardless of our performance, which we don't want measured by anyone else except ourselves, the notion of independent oversight an insult to our status as the folk who know best and benefit most from the status quo and the arrangements we make for you'."
In this third part of our latest mini-series on the same theme 10 years on, we look back at what I advocated in 2016 in a series penned three years before we would find ourselves in London, with 30+ athletes, a very wealthy man called Konstantin Grigorishin, the excellent labour-relations expert he brought with him, and others seeking to provide swimming with a showstopper event to break the drought in between Olympic seasons.
Some of the ideas were not only picked up by the ISL but found their way into the World Aquatics program, among recent 'innovations' an open water knockout competition first suggested in my 2016 fantasy throw-forward.
Among the most critical novelties of approach by the International Swimming League was that athletes, as well as entourage - and all assembled in professional teams - would, for the first time in swimming history, be paid a professional wage for their work by an event organiser.
We know why it ended where it did four years ago, in a conflation of Russian aggression closing in just as criticism of the League from swimmers, managers and coaches over delayed and missed payments. We allude to that and other relevant factors leading to this FORUM in our first two parts of our latest series:
Part 1:
Craig Lord
Part 2:
Craig Lord
My 2016 feature was written at the end of the Phelps era. Swimming was still marvelling at the epic, audacious, soaring nature of the tally of tallies in swimming - and all– sports, all-Games history: Michael's Olympic swan song added a further five golds and one silver to a pantheon with 23 golds, and 28 medals in all, on the top shelf reserved for Olympic Heights 2004 to 2016, the American's debut at Sydney 2000 delivering a sensational 5th place in the 200 'fly.
From gun to 66 golds atop 83 international podiums for the USA, it was all much more than outstanding, eight golds at Beijing 2008 the oft-cited high of highs, Melbourne 2007 among my fondest memories down the 40 years of covering the sport and the 60-plus steeped in swimming.
The Phelps era was one in which the American and his coach Bob Bowman generated many thousands of headlines around the world for a long, sustained period of process alchemised to excellence on race day.
And yet, here we are in 2026, and too little has changed, far less, in fact, than would is required for governors to merit the 'reform' badges sen to their blazers in an attempt to place clear blue water between Cornel Marculescu's reign at FINA (on their watch) and the current reign, one still wedded to the World Cup as the premier earning-event in the sport.
Some things have changed, but we're talking low-hanging fruit for the most part, the stuff they find too tricky politically (note, not legally, talk of which amounts to a missive red herring) untouched. WA leadership has still not honoured pledges made five years ago to generations of women swimmers robbed of rightful status by the GDR's doping machine. The pledge was simple: a truth, recognition and reconciliation process. There's no sign on the horizon that the promises will ever be kept. At least Marculescu never promised. To do so and then let athletes down as Husain Al-Musallam and his team have, is, perhaps, unsurprising ... yet shameful nonetheless.
It's one of many aspects of current governance that no hiding behind new brands can mask, and reminded me of the culture such things held hands with.
The Phelps era ended with the great athlete on the cover of the FINA Magazine,0 celebrated as the GOAT of the Olympic art in a photo with the alpha-male of rotten governance: then president Julio Maglione, chum of Vlad Putin and other unsavoury folk, was not only on the cover with the biggest hauler in Olympic history but outshone Phelps by a factor of about 30 to 1 when it came to the number of photos of the two men in an edition supposed to be a special in honour of the swimmer but swamped with more images of a blazer than you could shake a stick at, a man who treated the sport like a long-term carpark for a lifetime of free-wheeling holidays as a 'volunteer' executive at the helm of a system that tolerated no tough questions of the kind essential to good governance.
As Dale Neuburger, the man who supported his candidacy and served throughout the Maglione years with no open criticism of what was unfolding top be found in any public record of those years, one confirmed directly to me when I asked him if there was any serious kick back and argument at Bureau meetings: "No ... It's nearly all decided on in advance. Cornel goes through the agenda, there's a show of hands, sometimes someone might ask a question about something of particular interest to them, but even that's rare. The whole thing is timed so we're done in time for a very nice lunch."
And those were the folk in charge of deciding how to honour a constitutional commitment to growth of a kind that placed the athlete as THE priority in a sport that had supposedly been on a 'professional' pathway since the late 1980s.
I mention such things to remind you just how bad it was in the dying days of FINA as Maglione led a Bureau with the support of some of the most senior figures at the top table of the sport today. That those men sat in silence, and even supported such moves as a third term for Maglione as president after he'd come to the throne on a promise of two terms only says much about the prevailing culture of governance then, a culture that is as much a part of the 'reformist' era now as it was back then, the presence of Antonio Silva at World and European Aquatics a clear case in point, for reasons we have followed, and shall continue to follow and note as the story bubbles along, slowly but surely towards a conclusion that could leave a legacy just as awkward as Maglione's did.
Having set up some key background scene setters, we now return to Swimbledon, to 2016, when we first considered how swimming, a sport struggling to keep its head above water in the sea of sports that gain mainstream media and broadcast attention, might grow by selling itself to a wider audience.
When it comes to the willingness of governors and ability of the sport to attract and embrace a professional economy fit to sustain the kind of professional-wage paying environment seen in other sports, we can turn to tennis as a prime example of a sport that is both
- well shy of paying the 50% revenue shares to athletes even in some of the biggest Pro sports
- yet paying the lowest ranked among 700 or so players on Slam tour far more than any swimmer gets for anything remotely like the same standard of achievement.
The following highlights how the World Cup falls well shy of the model required for swimming to be considered a professional sport, as opposed to a sport populated by poorly rewarded professionals:
Wimbledon and Some Key Grand-Slam Stats:
- Over 700 different tennis players receive prize money for taking part in each Grand Slam, with approximately 650 to 750 unique individuals earning a paycheck across the four major tournaments in an average year.
- The breakdown of how these payouts are distributed at a single Grand Slam tournament includes:
Singles Main Draw: 128 men and 128 women (256 players total) are paid just for entering the first round.
Singles Qualifying: 128 men and 128 women (256 players) compete in qualifying rounds, where players who lose before the main draw still receive payouts, starting around the first round of qualifying.
Doubles & Mixed Doubles: 128 doubles players (64 teams) and 32 mixed doubles players are paid per event.
Wheelchair & Juniors: Wheelchair singles/doubles draws and junior draws also receive prize funds or expense stipends.
Even with 700-plus athletes earning a check at a single tournament, the distribution remains heavily top-heavy, the gap between millionaires and the players down the ranking stark. Nonetheless, swimmers will doubtless feel a little envious of this fact: first-round losers in the main draw of the US Open and Australian Open have pushed payouts to well over $100,000.
Travelling on constant tennis tour is expensive, of course, and unlike swimmers, tennis players must pay their own way, their coaching and medical expenses. Grand Slams pay players around 15% of tournament revenue compared to nearly 50% in major team sports. That situation caused top stars to demand larger payouts for the broader player pool. Here's that pressure building, in a BBC article from October last year.
Imagine that, the stars of swimming speaking up for those even worse off than themselves. It's the equivalent of Cam McEvoy complaining on behalf of a swimmer who gets, well, nothing at all, as opposed to him and others in the top tier of the sport noting the 'zero' in the shot when a 20.88sec World record goes down.
As said, swimming is unique and must find formats that suit its nature, reflect its traditions yet still manage to reach beyond the traditional heats, semis, finals, championship formats that many, including me, support wholeheartedly for the biggest occasions and 'championships', all levels.
In Part 4, we'll get back to 2026 and revise any thought that needs revising, but here is what I wrote in 2016, pre International Swimming League, an entity come and gone after a few seasons from 2019, missing for four years now, but planning its return for either later this year or sometime next year.
