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World Aquatics has unveiled a three-stop Swimming World Cup Series for 2024 that will take place entirely in southeast Asia. That follows a 2023 series that took place entirely in Europe and a 2022 series that had 1 stop in Europe and 2 in North America.
- Shanghai, China, 18-20 October
- Incheon, South Korea, 24-26 October
- Singapore, 31 October – 2 November
World Aquatics seems to have settled on a compact three meet series for now among an increasingly-crowded international swimming calendar. The series peaked at 12 stops around the turn-of-the-century and has gradually and non-linearly shrunk since.
The 2024 post-Olympic series will also return to its traditional short course meters format in the buildup to the 2024 World Short Course Swimming Championships in AQUA’s new home of Budapest, Hungary. That meet will take place in December 2024, with exact dates yet-to-be confirmed.
Incheon, the host site of the 2014 Asian Games, is a new city for the World Cup Series, though World Aquatics has visited the country of South Korea many times for different meets. Daejon is the only city in South Korea to previously host a Swimming World Cup, with events running there in 2003-2004, 2004-2005, and 2005-2006 seasons.
Shanghai, China’s largest and the world’s third-largest city by population, hosted stops in 1993, 1999-2000, 2000-2001, 2001-2002, and 2002-2003.
Singapore is the most-experienced of the three sites for World Cups. That city hosted for 13 straight years from 2007 through 2019, but hasn’t hosted since the COVID-19 pandemic canceled the 2020 season.
In possible foreshadowing of this decision, China sent most of its elite swimmers to the 2023 World Cup Series beginning the week after the Asian Games concluded. Qin Haiyang won the men’s series ahead of Thomas Ceccon of Italy and Matthew Sates of South Africa, making him the first Chinese swimmer to ever win a World Cup series title.
Kaylee McKeown of Australia won the women’s series, with Hong Kong’s Siobhan Haughey finishing 2nd and China’s Zhang Yufei finishing 3rd.
