2025 Para Swimming World Series — Melbourne
- February 14-16, 2025
- Melbourne Sports and Aquatics Centre — Melbourne, Australia
- LCM (50m)
- Start Times: Prelims – 8:30 am local/Finals – 4:30 pm local
- Live Stream
The Para Swimming World Series gets underway this weekend, with Melbourne hosting the first of the nine stops on this year’s circuit. Last year’s series was a high-energy affair—over 15 para swimming world records fell at the Berlin stop alone—as athletes prepared for the 2024 Paralympic Games.
With the majority of this year’s series taking place before September’s Para World Swimming Championships in Singapore, the stops serve as valuable opportunities to get racing in before the year’s major global championship.
If it’s your first time tuning into the Para Swimming World Series—the Australia Dolphins’ YouTube page is livestreaming the Melbourne edition—here are some basics to know.
2025 Para Swimming World Series Calendar:
- February 14-16: Melbourne, Australia
- March 13-16: Lignano Sabbiadoro, Italy
- March 20-23: Barcelona, Spain
- April 10-12: Fuji-Shizuoka, Japan
- April 24-26: Indianapolis, USA
- May 2-4: Paris, France
- June 12-15: Guadalajara, Mexico
- October 23-25: Lima, Peru
- November: exact dates to be confirmed
How Does Series Scoring Work?
The Para World Swimming Series (which is prelims/finals) uses a multi-class events scoring system. All athletes’ results at each stop of the Para Swimming World Series are fed into the standardized World Para Swimming points system, which determines a swimmer’s score for the series—similar to the AQUA Points calculator used on the World Aquatics World Cup.
Medals are awarded by points, instead of times, allowing athletes from different classes to compete in the same races and against each other for the overall series titles.
Brazil and Great Britain dominated the end-of-year awards for last year’s series, winning all but one event. Gabriel dos Santos Araujo and Alice Tai won the overall Series titles, scoring the most points across the series for men and women, respectively.
Now that the basics are covered, let’s get into what you need to know for the Melbourne edition, where 72 athletes from eight countries will get the 2025 Para Swimming World Series underway.
Melbourne Schedule
Day 1: Friday, February 14
- 100 freestyle (S1-14)
- 150 IM (SM1-4)
- 50 butterfly (S2-S13)
- 200 freestyle (S1-14)
- Mixed 4×100 medley 49pt relay
- Mixed 4×100 medley 34pt relay
- Mixed 4×100 medley S14 relay
Day 2: Saturday, February 15
- 400 freestyle (S6-14)
- 50 backstroke (S1-13)
- 100 breaststroke (SB2-14)
- 50 breaststroke (SB1-13)
- Mixed 4×100 freestyle S14 relay
- Mixed 4×100 freestyle 34pt relay
- Mixed 4×50 freestyle 20pt relay
Day 3: Sunday, February 16
- 100 backstroke (S1-14)
- 50 freestyle (S1-13)
- 200 IM (SM5-14)
- 100 butterfly (S5-14)
- Mixed 4×50 medley 20pt relay
- Mixed 4×100 freestyle 49pt relay
Unsurprisingly, the meet has drawn multiple members of Australia’s 2024 Paralympic team. Paralympic medalists Timothy Hodge, Emily Beecroft, and Jesse Aungles will all suit up this weekend. The three raced together on Australia’s gold-medal winning 4×100 medley relay 34pts in Paris. Hodge added a gold in the men’s 200 IM SM9 and silver in the men’s 100 butterfly S9 last summer, while Beecroft earned bronze in the women’s 100 butterfly S9.
Backstroke legend Yip Pin Xiu is also entered in the meet. The six-time Paralympic gold medalist has swept the women’s backstroke S2 events at the last three Paralympic Games.
I’be had a quick look at the competition list and have noticed something interesting. Australia’s Lakeisha Patterson has come up for review in her classification and has gone back to an S8!!! Seriously are these classifiers getting worse or is she getting better at putting on her disability?
Is there a place to see classification results from the meet?
There’s a ton of awful classifications going on there, especially in that S8 class! (Callum Simpson on the men’s side is especially bad)
Australian staff definitely have some sort of system designed to get their athletes where they want them:
– Only get classified at this meet, where very few countries are present due to the difficulty of travel
– All their star athletes only swim off events (never their primary events from Paris). Ex. Lakeisha is swimming only 100 fly / 100 breast entered with NT despite taking gold and silver in Tokyo/Paris in the S9 400 free
– Their star athletes swim seemingly intentionally slow (10-20+ second gain per 100m) and with a different “more… Read more »
I tuned in via the YouTube link and watched the 100m breast B final and Patterson swam way slower than her usual PB. I then went back and watched her heat swim and her walk to the blocks was more exaggerated than normal. Now if she walked like that in her heels that she wears in most of her Insta posts one would think that she would constantly be rolling an ankle…….??