European Aquatics (formerly LEN) has plans to revive the European U23 Championships for a 2025 edition, according to the organization’s latest newsletter.
Antonio Silva, the president of European Aquatics, held a meeting with the President of the Slovak Republic, Peter Pellegrini, his Minister of Sport and Tourism, Dusan Keketi, and Ivana Walterova Lange, the executive director for the Slovak Swimming Federation, during the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. The topic of the meeting was opportunities to host the Junior European Championships and U23 Championship in Solvakia in 2025.
At the conclusion of the meet, Slovakia was announced as the host of both events as part of a slate of upcoming hosting appointments.
“After successfully hosting a range of age-group events in other disciplines, Slovakia aims big and will organise the summer’s two top age-group EA meets in swimming, the highly anticipated 2nd edition of the U23 Europeans at the end of June and a couple of days later, the European junior swimming championships, an innovative approach to scheduling which will concentrate attention and be cost efficient.”
The first edition of the championships for swimmers aged 19-23 were hosted in August 2023 in Dublin, Ireland. While the meet is titled “European,” organizers allowed participating teams from the United States, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, though they were excluded from the standard medal rankings and instead given ‘commemorative medals’ based on where they would have finished.
European Aquatics has not revealed specific plans to invite guest nations in 2025, but linking the event to the European Junior Swimming Championships, which has been around since 1967, could help the event’s credibility with some European federations that were hesitant to send athletes to a new event.
This will be Slovakia’s first time hosting a European Junior Swimming Championships as well.
Slovakia is a landlocked country in Central Europe that became independent again after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993. The Czech Republic, the other half of that former union, hosted shortly after the dissolution in 1994 and then again in 2009.
While a specific hosting venue has not yet been announced, last year’s Slovakian National Championships were hosted in Samorin, just outside of the capital Bratislava, at the massive Slovkian Olympic Training Center.
