With yesterday’s announcement by FINA of significant changes to its annual World Cup Series, arguably the event’s biggest star, Hungarian Katinka Hosszu, took to social media to make her disappointment known. Along with stating that the new rules, such as limiting a swimmer’s number of events per stop to 4, ‘just made swimming a lot more boring’, Hosszu identifies this type of thinking as ‘why swimming is still an amateur sport.’
Asked about the changes in the above video provided by ZRT ATV, FINA Executive Director Cornel Marculescu says he believes the new rules will ‘stimulate the participation of the best athletes.’ He states that the Series will be reviewed after ‘one year of experience’ to see how the new changes fared.
Marculescu also maintains that the FINA Technical Committee is the group responsible for developing the new World Cup rules and that FINA Vice President Tamás Gyárfás ‘was not involved in any of these decisions.’
The question was raised, as Gyárfás is the former Chief of the Hungarian Swimming Federation. He resigned from his post in November of 2016 after facing highly publicized criticism from Hungary’s top swimmers, including Hosszu.
As long as you have one country one vote at the FINA Congress the sport will be ruled by people from minor nations, most of them with a non-existent record in elite swimming. It explains FINA’s current mediocrity. Moreover, most of the 200 or so FINA members are nations which are corrupt and undemocratic therefore it’s inevitable that the world governing body will mirror its constituent parts.
What do you expect from an organization in which the President is a Uruguayan, the vice-President is Hungarian, and the Executive Director is Romanian?! These are unquestionably the most corrupted countries in the world.
All organisations should be led by ppl from the lands of the olde British Empire .Btw that excludes all US states who joined after Independence .
Only WE have they key to Truth & Justice & Governance . Its in the Covfefe Convention .
Thank you for speaking truth to power.
Whatever, good point. Check out https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_perceptions_index_2016#table
which is an independent body monitoring world corruption.
Hungary is in position 57, which it shares with Romania also 57. Although Uruguay is ranked 21st above France in 23rd spot. Denmark and New Zealand occupy the top spot as least corrupt countries. Out of swimming nations the most corrupt are Russia in position 131 and then China and Brazil sharing position 79 in the rankings. No surprise there as that correlates with the current and historical doping records of those countries, state sponsored or otherwise.
Never a country is corrupted, but the actual political structure. Yet true to say that Uruguay and Romania don’t represent too much top swimmers, and Gyarfas has never been an athlete or coach either.