Normally, the even-year summer between Olympics is incredibly quiet. That was especially going to be the case this year, with the World Cup taking place in November-December instead of its usual June-July timeframe. Then our buddy COVID hit and turned a quiet summer into one that will be ridiculously busy.
Athletes from Great Britain, especially, will get plenty of opportunities to make up for lost time. The Commonwealth Games are held in the non-Olympic even years, so they were already scheduled for 2022. So were the every-two-years European Championships, which are in even years since World Championships take place in odds. Except all of the 2021 World Championships were pushed back, so they're all happening this year, too.
I used Great Britain as the example because that's the only country that will definitely be involved in all three. And they're all squeezed to a period of about two months! For British track & field athletes, it'll be three major championships in six weeks!
It's not just British athletes, either. Pretty much everybody except the Americans and athletes from some of the Asian nations will have at least two championship events this summer, whether it be the World Championships and Commonwealth Games or World Championships and European Championships.
Because of that tight schedule, some athletes have understandably decided that their summer would be a little too busy if they chose to compete at every major championship event. Ariarne Titmus, for example, has decided to focus on the Commonwealth Games (which are huge in Australia), so there won't be any duels between her Katie Ledecky at the World Championships.
Skipping the World Championships can't be an easy decision, but it shows you how important the Commonwealth Games are to athletes from those nations! And the Commonwealth Games are only once every four years, while this year wasn't even supposed to include Worlds, so you can see why that would be the one to take a pass on. Besides, a lot of athletes usually skip the post-Olympic World Championships anyway. The pre-Olympic Worlds in 2023 are the really important one.
That's the craziest part of all this. It's not just the summer of 2022 that will be jam-packed. We'll be jam-packed all the way until the Paris Olympics! With the 2021 Worlds pushed back a year, all of the major Olympic sports will have back-to-back World Championships this year and next year, then another World Championships in 2025. Counting the Tokyo and Paris Olympics, it'll be five straight years with a major global championship!
For swimming, it'll actually be four straight years with a World Championships. For about a week, there wasn't going to be a World Championships this year at all after the Worlds in Fukuoka, Japan were moved to next year. Then Budapest stepped in at the last minute to guarantee there still would be a 2022 World Championships. They also moved the 2023 World Championships in Doha to January 2024, so there'll be both a World Championships and an Olympics that year before they finally get back on schedule in 2025.
So, after having an entire season wiped out by a global pandemic, athletes will get plenty of opportunities to compete on a worldwide stage. Never before have there been so many elite, championship events in such a short period of time. I won't say it completely makes up for 2020 because nothing ever will. But an annual global meet for the next few years is their reward for enduring the lockdowns and coming out on the other side.
This is actually a reward for all of us. Because, unlike at the Olympics, these World Championships are staggered. So, it's gonna be a jam-packed summer in more ways than one. One event will end and the next will start almost immediately. How can you be anything but excited about that?
In fact, the fun has already started. The Beach Volleyball World Championships in Rome got underway over the weekend, with the finals scheduled for Sunday. Those last two days will actually overlap with swimming, which starts on Saturday in Budapest and runs until June 25 (with diving to follow during the second week). Then the World Track & Field Championships come to America for the first time in from July 15-24 in Eugene, Oregon (it's exactly one month until I leave for Eugene).
You might be thinking that it's kind of early for World Championships. "Aren't they usually later in the summer?" The answer to that question is "Yes, they are." But they had to be shoehorned into a summer where the prime dates were already taken by the Commonwealth Games (July 28-August 8) and the multi-sport European Championships (August 11-21).
Now, just think what would've happened had the word "COVID" never entered our vocabulary. This summer would've been completely empty (at least from an American perspective), especially with the later-than-usual World Cup. Instead it's loaded! There's World Championships in everything!
The summer sports schedule for 2022 never would've changed without COVID, so, in a weird way, there's a silver lining to what we've all had to endure over the past two years. Some athletes will be very busy as a result of the schedule changes, but I'm sure they don't mind. After all, we've all seen the alternative. And being incredibly busy sure beats not being allowed to do anything at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment