The Court of Arbitration for Sport informed SwimSwam on Monday that they had rejected the request for a temporary injunction against FINA’s decision to not qualify Guinea-Bissau swimmer Siphiwe Baleka for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games.
“Please be advised that on 16 July 2021 the President of the CAS Appeals Arbitration Division dismissed a request for provisional measures filed by Siphiwe Baleka in which he sought to stay the execution of FINA’s decision not to qualify him.”
That stay would have allowed Baleka to travel to Japan as if he were competing – which is a matter of particular issue this versus other years because of the COVID-19 safety protocols in place for individuals arriving in Japan.
Baleka last week filed with the Court of Arbitration for Sport, claiming that FINA has improperly interpreted an ambiguous deadline and rejected his bid to represent his adopted country at the Olympic Games at the age of 50. This marks a setback, though not a final decision, in his attempt to become the oldest Olympic swimmer in history.
Sources tell SwimSwam that the rejection was based primarily based on an administrative technicality – Baleka failed to lay out the 3 prerequisites for filing a stay. They have amended their request and asked for a reconsideration.
Under FINA selection rules, the deadline for federations to submit paperwork for Universality athletes was on June 20, 2021. That date is a week ahead of the deadline listed by FINA for athletes to achieve “Olympic qualifying swims,” which is June 27.
Baleka had originally based his universality application (submitted on June 17) on a time he swam at the 2019 International Masters Championships in Egypt, where he swam 25.25.
But FINA informed Baleka that the 2019 Egypt meet had not been a FINA-approved Olympic qualifying event. Baleka scrambled to find a new FINA-approved Olympic qualifying meet in which to compete before the June 27 deadline, eventually competing in the Egypt Swimming National Championships on June 26.
FINA’s position is that universality qualifying has a different qualifying period than A/B cut qualifying, implied by the June 20 submission deadline. Baleka’s camp maintains that FINA rules don’t specifically list different qualifying periods for universality and A/B cut swimmers, and that his June 26 swim should still qualify him because his application was submitted on-time and his swim (though after the submission deadline) still came before the qualifying period ended.
Baleka was born and raised in the United States (Oswego, Ill.) and went to Yale as a collegiate swimmer before attempting to make the U.S. Olympic team for the 1992 Games in Barcelona—then under the name “Tony Blake.”
Since then, in addition to adopting his new name “Siphiwe Baleka” from tribal elders in South Africa, according to Sports Illustrated, Baleka has been a truck driver and a 13-time U.S. Masters Swimming national champion.
On June 10, Baleka officially became a dual citizen of both the U.S. and Guinea-Bissau, following the Council of Ministers of the Government of Guinea-Bissau completing his “naturalization process.”
If Baleka were to be accepted, he would be the 73rd entrant in the men’s 50 free. His 25.25 from the Egyptian Nationals last month would rank him 52nd among those with entries for Tokyo.
Dude needs to just let it go. It’s kind of sad how he is trying to exploit the Universality rule to live his Olympic dream.
Reading the SI article about him, it’s like he conflated making Olympic Trials cuts (which he just missed) with an actual shot at making the Olympic team back in the day. I thought it was going to be that he got third, just missing the team, and it gnawed at him all these years. I get the “you got a lane, you got a chance” argument, but it’s BS for the 100s, where there’s no way the slowest seeds have any chance of getting on the team. That said, he’s a helluva masters swimmer.
If he makes it he’ll be the best Olympian money can buy