At the FINA Bureau Meeting in Cancun, Mexico this week, FINA approved the membership of Haiti as their 204th federation.
Haiti is the second new member federation that has been added by FINA from the Caribbean region in the last year, after Curacao officially took the spot of the Netherlands Antilles last year.
Haiti’s federation, the Haitian Swimming Association and Life Saving, was founded in 1994 when the government realized that there was a huge problem of drowning in the country – 3/4 of their territory is covered in water, but few knew how to swim.
Thus far, Haiti is not established as a member of any of the major swimming organizations, so we’ve been unable to find any good recent results for them. They will likely, however, join the CCCAN, or Central American and Caribbean Swimming Federation, which currently has 27 members as their first step.
The country does have a single Olympic swimmer in its history, however. They sent a 100 butterflier named Alain Sergile to the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, where he finished 56th out of 58 swimmers with a 58.23. Sergile trained at SMU, from where he graduated in 1994.
While Haiti is the poorest countries in the Americas, as measured by the Human Development Index, there is one pool – at the Centre Sportif de Carrefour, that was built in 1982. We couldn’t find precise details about the pool, but it is often referred to as an “Olympic Size Pool” in news reports (which could mean a number of things) and is badly in need of repairs.
Editor’s note: SwimSwam has been visited 83 times in its history from Haiti, which is the same number of times it’s been visited from Cuba. That ranks it 168th among all countries that have visited SwimSwam.
Je suis Dr. Evenel Mervilus, president of the “Association Haitienne de Natation et de Sauvetage. Haiti’s integration to FINA is a great step. My staff and I determine to make a different in aquatic sport in Haiti. For me, it does not make any sense at all for Haiti to be an Island where only 1% of the population knows how to swim. It is pretty challenging, but we will do our best to make Haiti world champion some day. It will take time, but it will happen. Let’s continue to work together.