Can Swimming Become a Truly Professional Sport?

SwimSwam welcomes reader submissions about all topics aquatic, and if it’s well-written and well-thought, we might just post it under our “Shouts from the Stands” series. We don’t necessarily endorse the content of the Shouts from the Stands posts, and the opinions remain those of their authors. If you have thoughts to share, please send them to [email protected].

This “Shouts from the Stands” submission comes from Hagai Ashlagi

Can Swimming to become a truly professional sport

Prologue to you the reader, yes – you. One request – defer judgment until the end. Some of you may shake your head as you read parts of this column. So your prior patience is requested.

1. A sport who’s by-far greatest highlight comes every four years (ie – at the Olympic Games), is not and cannot be, a commercially successful professional sport. 

There are too many examples of sports far more successful than swimming at the Olympics. Tennis has four grand slam tournaments a year; Road Cycling has three grand tours, five single day “monuments” and an annual world championship. Winter sports like skiing and biathlon have an annual world cup and world championships. That’s even before mentioning team “ball” sports like Basketball, Soccer, Rugby, etc.

Even marathon running, with its 6 “marathon majors”, and triathlon with its long distance and middle distance/T100 competitions, sustain a year round professional competitive circuit.

The thing that commercially successful sports must have, is either several annual competitive peaks, or annual league play that includes all the top athletes, culminating in a championship.

Be it due to the mentality of coaches, swimmers or, the sport’s management, swimming barely has one annual peak, that lasts a mere eight days. With all due respect, that’s not enough to sustain a commercially viable sport.

2. In order to be a professional, a sport needs to be managed by professionals.

Having an international federation (World Aquatics, in swimming’s case) is fine. But such federations seldom manage to truly commercialize and professionalize a sport. Especially not when the federation is headed by a mid level politician from a country with zero competitive athletes from that particular sport – as is the case with the Kuwaiti chairman of World Aquatics.

Sports can achieve professional and commercial success only under professional management. All of the examples above apply here as well. Sport institute politicians don’t manage the NBA, the NFL, Wimbledon or the Tour de France. There can be political affiliations, but the management is professional and commercially orientated.

3. The NCAA job is not to push swimming to professionalism.

Colleges are educational institutes, and student athletes are part of that. The fact that NCAA schools handsomely pay coaches and operate competitive swimming programs is immensely important, commendable and invaluable to US swimming. But the NCAA is not on any immediate path to instill any form of all-encompassing professionalism within the collegiate system. It is simply not its job.

4. In order to become truly commercial and professional, tournaments, leagues, and stadium-like venues (in pools and open water) need to become part of swimming’s future.

Would you pay a ticket to stand on a bridge in London over the Thames and watch David Popovici, Kyle Chalmers, Pan Zhanle, Jack Alexy, Luke Hobson and Leon Marchand duel it from one bank to the other?

Would you tune in to watch a two-way crossing finals race of the Seine river in the heart of Paris, between Ariarne Titmus, Summer McIntosh, Katie Ledecky, Siobhan Haughey and Mollie O’Callaghan for a hefty purse?

How about a 50 m straight line dash between McEvoy, Dressel, Proud and Crooks, from pier 26 and 25 in New York city on the Hudson? Or a 50 m breaststroke on the same course between Adam Peaty and Qin Haiyang

I would watch all of them.

Swimming must innovate. Big prize annual events need to become constant, for the sport to generate year-round interest.

5. For generating global interest, swimming must be in meters.

I adore the US collegiate system, but if more US swimmers want a chance at professionalism, it’s time for the NCAA to join the metric world.

In the summer, US swimmers train and race in meters. World records are recorded exclusively in meters. If the Budapest 2024 world short course championships taught us anything, it that the NCAA’s swimming in yards is costing collegiate swimmers untold opportunities at world and national records.

There’s no denying that World Records generate global interest and revenue. Both in video viewing, and in sponsorships – institutional and personal. NCAA swimmers, tournaments and collegiate programs are missing out on these revenues. Yards are costing the NCAA swimmers money and thereby shortening their careers. Its time the NCAA find a way to gradually move at least Division I programs to meters.

6. Too much underwater is not interesting and is also countering the necessity of the different strokes.

In the short pools, 15 meters of underwater fly kick after every turn discourage viewing and counter the very essence of different strokes. With all due respect, watching 60 underwater meters out of 100 meters/yards, time and time again in a short-course pool, has proven to not generate sufficient POPULAR interest (not talking about YOU SwimSwam diehards). The underwaters need to be limited. Perhaps to 15 meters after the start and 10 meters after turns. The strokes need to be kept significant, and the viewing experience needs to be improved. (Look at what Volleyball and Table Tennis have done to their scoring systems, to make things more interesting.)

These thoughts are hardly cast in stone. But when we look hard at what progress swimming has made in the last 25 years since the Sydney Olympics toward becoming a truly commercial and viably professional sport for its athletes and spectators (I suggest – very few, if any), you may consider some of them, or at least come up with ideas of your own as to how the real commercialism and professionalism of the sport can be achieved before the year 2050.

About Hagai Ashlagi

A former age group, and current masters and open water swimmer;

Legal counsel of a professional European Basketball League and partner in “The Aquatic League” – A Mediterranean open water swimming league.