The World Aquatics has made significant changes to its universality requirements for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. In a memo issued earlier this week, federations were informed that athletes will no longer need to have competed at the 2023 or 2024 World Aquatics Championships in order to be eligible for universality. Instead, the fastest athletes from each national federation will have the opportunity to represent their country in the Olympics, subject to exceptional circumstances assessed by the World Aquatics Executive.
This decision comes after the conclusion of the 2023 and 2024 World Aquatics Championships and is part of a broader overhaul of the universality system in the Olympics. Other changes include sending athletes with the highest FINA Points Table score to mitigate concerns of domestic corruption in universality selection. Additionally, new eligibility criteria have been implemented, limiting universality athletes to competing in up to two Olympic Games in their career and being no older than 30 as of December 31st, 2024.
The shift in guidelines aims to focus on domestic development of young swimmers and achieve Olympic qualifying times. The goal is to deter nations with less-developed swimming programs from repeatedly sending the same athletes to the Games, instead of focusing on nurturing a new generation of swimmers. Universality athletes will still have a higher priority in Olympic selection compared to swimmers with “B” standards under the 852 athlete quota for the Games, which is a reduction of 26 spots from Tokyo Olympics.
The deadline for submitting universality applications for Paris 2024 Games is June 24th,
