Olympic champion swimmer Katinka Hosszú criticizes FINA’s new World Cup rules

In a long letter, Olympic Champion Swimmer Katinka Hosszú criticizes FINA’s new World Cup rules. According to the new regulations, in the future athletes can compete only in four events. This rule strikes the heart of Katinka’s training schedule who used World Cup competitions as part of her training plan competing sometimes in seven events. This is what she writes:

Dear Fellow Swimmers,

You might be reading these words in the middle of the night or just before dawn. I am not sure when you find the time, but what I do know for sure is that from all of the elite athletes in the world, swimmers get up the earliest and go to bed the latest. This isn’t exactly by choice. Most of us have to live two lives. While we strive for greatness in the pool, we must also manage our lives outside the pool. While the Iron Lady is preparing for Worlds in Budapest, Katinka prepares for her life after swimming. Although the World sees us, swimmers, as one of the most hard working and determined professionals, our leaders seem to think our sport is amateur, therefore we are amateurs, and that is exactly the way they treat us.

If swimming is still not a professional sport, then that is a reflection of the work FINA has been doing for the past few decades, not a reflection on the sport that is one of the fundamentals of childhood athletic development. There is a reason why many children do not stick to competitive swimming; it is extremely challenging. If you want to be a swimmer in 2017, you can know one thing is for sure, if you are not in the top 5 in the World, you will invest more than you will make. Does it sound attractive? Not really. Could we make it more appealing? I am certain that we can, so long as FINA helps us, instead of holding the best athletes back.

First of all, they should reach out and listen to us, the swimmers. They should hear us out and not decide upon major rule changes without our input on the topic. If they would have asked for our opinion, we could have told them that the World Cup has huge potential, but the planned new rule changes are destructive and hypocritical.

Everyone thinks that the new World Cup rule changes are against Katinka Hosszu. That can be partially true, because they definitely screwed me over. Imagine, I’m like one of those students that got straight A’s in every class, plus took-on drawing and chorus as extra curricular activities. Then, the next year I’m told I cannot do extra curricular activities because my success was bothering the rest of the students. The real truth, however, was that it was only the teacher who was bothered.

I could view myself as a victim, but, on the other hand, I get advantages from FINA that I never requested. I don’t want to automatically advance to the finals of the World Cup competitions based on my previous results at international competitions. I want to race for the final spots with young talents, like Iwasakis or Egerszegis, and if they are better than me at the age of 14, let them show their talent. With the new World Cup rule changes they have to start from a disadvantage—they have to wait until the sport’s top athletes get old or finish their careers before they can have the advantage of automatic advancement to finals. This is just not fair.

According to the new rules of the competition, every event won’t be offered at every stop. Now, for example, a top German swimmer might not compete in his own country because his main event (or events) will only be offered in Moscow or Eindhoven, but not Berlin. Why does FINA make rules that are harmful for the athletes, the organizers of the competition, the World Cup itself and swimming as a whole? These rules are risking the future of our sport, which I am not willing to support with my silence.

How can a sport label rules “innovative” when they are actually destructive, limiting the participation of the sport’s top athletes? Will the NBA limit one of its biggest stars, LeBron James, in his eighth participation in the big final next year? Will the ATP try to remind Nadal and Federer that their time is over? As one of the current faces of swimming, I should be focused on preserving and extending my career by not taking on too many events and not having my image being overused. Instead, here I am fighting to be allowed to swim as much as I want and to continue to popularize my sport.

Please don’t think that the leaders of FINA don’t know all of this. They are desperate to keep the importance of the World Championships alive and thriving – an event in which the revenues and profits do not get shared with the athletes – by destroying the World Cup, an event that could be in the future a more lucrative opportunity financially for many swimmers. FINA clearly sees that they could loose their complete power over the sport if even a few of the athlete’s images were to grow bigger than FINA’s. My story is not about Katinka Hosszu but about all the professional swimmers who have already realized they have enough power to influence the sport’s future.

I strongly believe that swimming can be a real professional sport, but for that we need to break the sport’s previous decades long mentality, which is based on the idea: everyone is equal, but among equals there should be more equals. FINA’s leaders have already decided: they do not want to treat the swimmers as equal negotiating partners, and instead they created destructive rules, which are specifically limiting our opportunities. Instead of representing the sport and the swimmers’ interests, they focus exclusively to please their own business interests while they operate as if it were 1989 rather than 2017.