Brazil’s Gabriel Araujo and Great Britain’s Alice Tai capped impressive seasons by earning the 2024 Para Swimming World Series titles to their collection of accolades. The two Paralympic champions were named as the overall winners after the 2024 Series concluded in December.
A standardized points system calculates all athletes’ results at each series stop. The athletes with the highest points totals across all stops wins. Overall awards and winners for the high support needs, junior, and best national Paralympic committee categories are given out. Araujo and Tai’s wins led a dominant showing for Brazil and Great Britain—the two nations claimed all but one title, the Best Female High Support Needs Athlete crown, which went to Spanish Paralympic star Teresa Perales.
Araujo earned 4229 points at the France and Berlin World Series stops, securing the overall men’s award for the second straight year. He also claimed the male high-support needs athlete award. This award highlights how dominant Araujo was this year; in addition to his success on the World Series tour, the 22-year-old earned three gold medals at the Paris Paralympics and broke the 150 IM SM2 world record twice in one day, which earned him Brazil’s Athlete of the Year and L’Equipe’s inaugural Men’s Para-Sport Champion of Champions award.
This win marks Tai’s second time winning the women’s overall series ranking but it’s her first win in five years. The first half of the decade was marked with injuries for Tai; she pulled out of the Tokyo Games with an elbow injury and had her right leg amputated below the knee after increased pain in her right foot from the bilateral talipes she was born with. Tai returned to international competition in 2022, but 2024 marked a huge resurgence for the 25-year-old. She earned five medals at the Paris Paralympics, including her first and second individual golds. Tai scored 4184 points across the Berlin and Lignano stops to win her first women’s overall World Series rankings since 2019.
Her Team GB teammate William Ellard came second in the men’s overall rankings, but he defended his title in the junior boys’ classification. Ellard scored 4027, just getting the better of his British teammate Rhys Darbey. Great Britain swept the junior awards as Olivia Newman-Baronius won the girls’ rankings with 3948 points, beating Japan’s Aira Kinoshita by 90 points.
It came down to the wire between Brazil and Great Britain for the best National Paralympic Committee title. In the end, Brazil successfully defended its title; its 16,086 points were just 34 more than Great Britain’s. Spain completed the top three with 15,107 points.
The 2025 Para Swimming World Series starts in Melbourne with a meet from February 14-16. There are seven stops on this year’s series, with para swimmers competing in Melbourne, Lignano, Barcelona, Fuji-Shizuoka, Paris, Guadalajara, and Lima from March through November.
