The 19th edition of the FINA World Aquatics Championships, the 2022 World Aquatics Championships, will be held in Budapest, Hungary, from June 18 to July 3, 2022. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in March 2022, FINA banned all Russians and Belarusians from competing in the championships.
Host Selection
After being postponed from 2021 to accommodate the delayed 2020 Summer Olympics in that year, the scheduled 2021 championships were set to be held in Fukuoka, Japan, in the summer of 2022. However, because to the present health implications of the Omicron variety and pandemic measures in Japan, the event in Fukuoka was postponed for a second time to 2023 in January 2022. Between the 2020 and 2024 Summer Olympics, there would have been a four-year gap between World Championships, with only one worldwide tournament.
Budapest was awarded as the host for an unusual out-of-sequence Championships from 18 June to 3 July 2022 by FINA on February 7, 2022, to ensure that competitors had a global aquatics championship to aim for in the summer of 2022.
Budapest will host the meet for the second time, 5 years following the 2017 World Aquatics Championships.
Venues for the 2022 World Aquatics Championships
- Arena on the Danube (swimming, diving)
- Lupa Lake (open water swimming)
- National Swimming Stadium Alfréd Hajós (artistic swimming, water polo)
- Swimming Pool in Debrecen (water polo)
- Swimming Pool in Szeged (water polo)
- Sopron is a kind of antibiotic (water polo)
Schedule of the 2022 World Aquatics Championships
There were 74 medal events in total, spread across five disciplines. Due to the training and recovery challenges of a busy aquatics calendar in 2022, FINA chose to flip the calendar, hold an event on a lesser scale than previous years, and only include the mandatory events of its program. As a result, the swimming events are scheduled for the first week rather than the usual second half.
FINA World Aquatics Championships
Swimming, diving, high diving, open water swimming, artistic swimming, and water polo are all represented at the FINA World Championships or World Aquatics Championships. They are organized by FINA, and all swimming events take place in a 50-meter pool.
The inaugural event was held in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1973, and it is now hosted every two years. The World Championships were contested every four years between the Summer Olympic years from 1978 to 1998. The Championships were held every two years, in odd years, from 2001 to 2019.
The scheduling of both the Olympic Games and the Championships between 2019 and 2025 became somewhat erratic due to the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, with World Championships not taking place in Japan in 2021 to accommodate the postponed 2020 Summer Olympics, and then postponed again to 2023 due to pandemic-related issues in Japan. As a result, a special edition of the tournament has been scheduled for Budapest, Hungary, in 2022, to avoid a four-year hiatus between World Championships. As a result, for the first time, World Championships will be held in four consecutive years: 2022 in Hungary, 2023 in Japan (the original 2021 event, twice delayed), 2024 in Qatar (moved to 2024 from the original 2023 event, then moved again to the beginning of 2024 to accommodate the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics), and 2025 in Russia.
The tournament is open to athletes from all 209 FINA members. In 2019, new milestones were reached for the number of countries competing (192), as well as the number of athletes (2,623).