While we’re looking ahead to next month’s World Aquatics Swimming World Cup Series and the Short Course World Championships in December, the qualification times for next year’s Long Course World Championships have been published.
The 22nd edition of the World Aquatics Championships (LCM) will take place from July 11th through August 3rd in Singapore with more than 2500 athletes across 6 disciplines expected to participate.
Swimming events will take place in the Singapore National Stadium with a capacity of 15,000 while open water swimming will be held in the Marina Bay Sands. Sentosa Island will have high diving, the OCBC Aquatics Centre will host diving, and water polo matches will also be played at the OCBC Aquatics Centre until the final at the Singapore Indoor Stadium, home to artistic swimming competitions.
The event was originally scheduled for Kazan, Russia, but it was relocated last February due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Singapore is the first country in Southeast Asia to ever host the World Championships, and the third Asian nation in a row to host Worlds after Qatar and Japan.
The World Aquatics Championships are typically a biennial event, but the 2025 edition will mark the fourth year in a row with Worlds due to postponements from the COVID-19 pandemic. Budapest, Hungary hosted in 2022, Fukuoka, Japan hosted in 2023, and Doha, Qatar hosted this year in February.
For pool swimming at the 2025 World Championships, the qualification window spans March 9th, 2024 through June 15th, 2025 and has the following ‘A’ and ‘B’ times attached.
World Aquatics 2025 World Championships Selection Policy
Per World Aquatics, the ‘A’ standards were created by using the faster of two times from the Fukuoka 2023/Doha 2024 “A” qualifying time standard; or, the 16th place time of the preliminary heats from the Fukuoka 2023 Championships.
For the women’s standards, 7 are from the former specification while 10 are based on the latter. The men’s standards have 6 from Fukuoka 2023/Doha 2024 while 11 are based on the Fukuoka 2023 heats.
All ‘B’ time standards were derived by multiplying the ‘A’ time standard by 3.5%.
We’re awaiting the full competitive schedule for Singapore across all sports.
Correction: Swimming will be held in a temporary venue of a pathetic 4K capacity only.
How about cuts for US World champs trials set to begin in less than 9 months
World Championship time standards are always significantly slower than Olympic Game standards. I guess it has to do with the greater atheletes cap at the Olympics. I do hope Singapore will have a 3.15m pool to avoid the Paris “disaster” of a terribly shallow (and slow) pool that greeted swimmers to race time. Perhaps Pan Zhanle would have been 46.0 in a *standard* Olympic pool!
Comparing Paris Olympics and 2023 WA WC, there were over 1000 more athletes at the WC (counting all the sports WA has). Did not see the specific number for swimming.