Dubai: Almost 200 top swimmers from around the world — including 2012 Olympic gold medallists Cameron van der Burgh and Chad le Clos — will compete in Dubai on Tuesday and Wednesday in the first round of the new Fina/Arena Swimming World Cup season.
A total of 137 men and 57 women from 32 countries are to race at the Hamdan Bin Mohammad Sports Complex in the first of eight legs in the series, which also takes place in Doha, Stockholm, Moscow, Berlin, Beijing, Tokyo and finally Singapore on November 10-11.
The Fina/Arena World Cup has run in its current format since 2007, offering prize money for each race, bonuses for world records and a $100,000 incentive to the overall series winner.
And the Dubai event will witness a first in the history of the World Cup as it will stage mixed relay races, with each team containing two male and two female competitors. The mixed races will be the 4x50m medley relay on Tuesday and the 4x50m freestyle relay on Wednesday.
Cornel Marculescu, Fina’s executive director, told the media here on Monday that the inclusion of mixed races in the programme will only enhance the sport and the prestige of the World Cup.
“It is very important for every discipline to improve and continue developing for the future of the sport,” he said. “The mixed relays was something that we’ve tried out at the Youth Olympic Games in Singapore [2010] and it was a success, going by the verdict of the athletes and the coaches. So we took this up with Carol [Zaleski], the Chairman of the Fina Technical Swimming Committee, and this opening round will be the first step to see where we are headed with the mixed relays.
“The initial response has been good and the most important thing now is to see how best we can face this challenge of having two new races into the schedule.”
Ahmad Al Falasi, President of the UAE Swimming Association, welcomed the athletes and officials for the two-day competition and stressed that such top-level events can only benefit the sport in the UAE.
“We have seen the results when we find that there are more and more schools involved in swimming in our country,” Al Falasi said.
Dubai Sports Council official Abdullah Shahdad, who is also the Championship Director, was pleased with the exceptionally strong field that the Dubai round has attracted. “This competition can only inspire our young swimmers and we can hope to have some of them winning medals in a few years’ time,” Shahdad said.
The competition starts with heats at 9am on Tuesday, with the official opening ceremony taking place at 5.30pm, followed by finals from 6pm.
