UK (Commonwealth) _ Having mere one month, before the Paris Games in June begin, Britain will not be sending its Olympic pool swimmers to the European Championships in Belgrade, Serbia; nevertheless, the country’s open water Olympians will undoubtedly travel there.
Hector Pardoe, Toby Robinson, and Hannah Crisp will compete for Britain at the Ada Ciganlija, a peninsula in the Sava River that passes through Belgrade, according to the British swimming news website Pullbuoy.
With an eye toward the future, the pool swimmers will be chosen following the British Championships the following week, based on those who are “on a trajectory for a podium performance at the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games.” However, it is not anticipated that those traveling to Lithuania for the July 2–7 European Junior Championships will be part of Britain’s Euros team.
The 22-year-old Pardoe won bronze in the men’s 10km event at the 2024 World Championships held in Doha, Qatar, last month. He became the first British open water swimmer to earn a medal at the Worlds since Welshman David Davies in 2008. At Worlds last month, 27-year-old Robinson finished 15th in the men’s 10 km race. Crisp, 22, finished 24th in the previous year’s women’s 10 km Worlds and 17th this year.
Olympians in open water will find it significantly simpler to pull off the double at the Euros because to the timetable. Open swimming will be held in the Seine River on June 10–13, before to the pool component of the European Championships, and on August 8–9, following the pool swimming in the Paris Olympics. While open water swimmers have almost seven weeks between the two meets, pool swimmers only have roughly five.
The 2024 World Championships have been postponed to February, which is unusual for this year’s calendar because the European Championships are usually shifted into the spring during summer Olympic years. This year, the Netherlands has decided not to send any swimmers to the European Championships, citing “overcrowded” schedules.
As previously announced in December 2023, the 2024 European Championships, scheduled for June 10–23, would be held in Belgrade, Serbia. This schedule places the multi-sport tournament a little more than a month away from the Summer Olympics in Paris, France, this year.
The schedule is largely the same as it was in 2021, when the 2020 European Championships were moved to 2021 and were held just a few months ahead of the Tokyo Olympic Games, which were also postponed.
For a lot of athletes, swimmers may hone their skills before the Games in Paris by competing at the European Championships. But for Dutch swimmers, that won’t be the case because the Royal Dutch Swimming Federation (KNZB) declared it wouldn’t be sending a team to Belgrade.
The official KNZB website states, “The primary cause [for not dispatching an official squad] is the packed schedule in 2024, with the Long Course World Championships (held in Doha, February), the Summer Olympics in Paris, and the Short Course World Championships (held in Budapest, December) serving as the highlights.
The competitive swimming world’s technical director, Sjors Lommerts, stated that leading swimmers’ coaches had stopped factoring in the uncertainty surrounding the 2024 European Championships—including where and when they would take place—when they were making plans for the Olympics.
This indicates that the dates of our own Eindhoven Qualification Meet (EQM), the National Championships in Amersfoort, the renowned ‘Sette Colli,’ in Italy the Mare Nostrum Tour in Canet, Barcelona, and Monaco, and our own Eindhoven Qualification Meet (EQM) have already been selected for further competitive incentives.
These are all about getting ready for Paris, and we, along with a lot of other elite swimmers from across the world, would rather compete in these events than the European Championships in Belgrade. The Russian city of Kazan was originally scheduled to host the 2024 European Championships until the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The 2024 European Aquatics Championships will be held in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, according to a Friday announcement from European Aquatics. Due to the “political situation” in Europe, the host announcement was postponed. The event was initially scheduled to take place in Kazan, Russia, before Russia invaded Ukraine last year. The 2024 European Championships, which were announced earlier this month, are scheduled for June 10-23. This puts them little over a month before the Olympics in Paris and immediately conflicts with the Sette Colli Trophy in Rome, which is one of the biggest tune-up meetings on the European swimming calendar (June 21–23).
