26/06/2022
The current Junior/Senior Slovak National Artistic Swimming team started working together in September 2017. The core of this team has been together ever since! Each year, one or two team members finishes for various reasons and each year a couple of younger athletes make the team. That is an absolutely normal life cycle of any sports team.
Achieving anything in artistic swimming is a long-term path, we all know that. This team competed very successfully at the Comen cup 2018 in Seville, at home at the World Youth AS Championships in Samorin in 2019, survived all corona obstacles and performed very well at the Junior European Championships in Malta in 2021.
With this history of results and their path clearly set for reaching more goals and bringing home more results, one would only expect that the Slovak Swimming Federation would do its best to support this team. And even if not doing its best in supporting this team, at least not throwing as many obstacles in front of this team as possible - I will not even start listing, but one fact that stands out and is worth mentioning is that, for no reason other than vindictiveness, none of these athletes were originally permitted to compete for the Senior National team for 2022 although they met all the set criteria…
Whatever nonsense these athletes have had to go through and overcome (especially in the last 9 months), they did so as a team and now they competed at the Senior World Championships in Budapest as the youngest team in the entire field. The achieved results speak for themselves = 3 finals and by the way, the “worst” team result in artistic swimming equals the best result achieved in competitive swimming.
I would be probably extremely naive if I was to expect a proper acknowledgment of this team’s achievements from the management of the Slovenská plavecká federácia - SPF so what I am asking for is STOP THROWING OBSTACLES IN FRONT OF THESE ATHLETES, LET THEM DO WHAT THEY DO BEST IN THE SYSTEM THAT HAS BEEN BRINGING THE MENTIONED RESULTS FOR SEVERAL YEARS, LET THEM SHOW YOU WHAT MORE THEY CAN ACHIEVE… LET ARTISTIC SWIMMING EXPERTS RUN ARTISTIC SWIMMING IN SLOVAKIA!
Just a simple question - is speed skating as a sport run anywhere in the world by figure skating experts? Just because both of those sports take place on ice, it doesn’t mean they can be run by anyone. And the same goes for swimming and artistic swimming! It’s time to realize that!
To close my post - I would like to explain why I chose this picture. Because this picture reflects the true nature of artistic swimming. Each member of a team has a specific role, they have to cooperate in every last detail. Artistic swimming is all about that and if someone/anyone does not understand this then they cannot run this sport!
LET THESE ATHLETES MAKE MORE HISTORY! TOGETHER IS THE ONLY WAY!