With just over a week to go until the British Swimming Selection Trials get underway in London, we are in a position to publish final entry lists.
Whilst we would love to have permitted the hundreds of entries we are used to welcoming to this event, the current climate we are operating has not permitted that, which we know the vast majority of the swimming community fully appreciate.
In fact the British Swimming Trials have challenged us like never before, with thousands and thousands of man hours being put in to make it possible, and some extremely difficult decisions along the way. As we are obliged to operate the meet using DCMS Guidelines, we have had to cap the numbers of people in the London Aquatic Centre at any one time, and also provide an event bubble with our accommodation partners. This has meant that many of our athletes who qualified for the meet have not now been given the opportunity to attend, and we are sorry that we have not been able to accommodate more athletes at this crucial meet of the Olympic cycle.
In order to provide a level of consistency across all events, we initially considered entry only to athletes that were within 10% of the Olympic consideration standard outlined in the ‘Table One Consideration Standards’ of our Tokyo Olympic Games selection policy, published in December 2020. To control numbers in the building at any one time, we then had to implement a second cap of a maximum of three heats of any event. Following acceptances from those athletes we then had to allocate a number of coaching/staff passes to support those athletes. Unfortunately, at the end of this process we did not have the capacity to ‘back-fill’ any events, as our maximum number of people in the venue had already been reached.
In total, we have accepted entries from just under 220 athletes, with entry lists ranging from nine in the Women’s 1500m Freestyle, up to a maximum of three full heats (24) in the Men’s 200m Freestyle, which is likely to be one of the events of the week.
When the action gets underway next Wednesday morning (14th April), it will be testament to a lot of hard work, determination and resilience from everyone involved, and it will be over to our swimmers to put on a show. We hope we’ll see world class swims across the events and multiple Tokyo consideration times.
Please do watch along with us on the British Swimming YouTube channel and show your support on social media.
A full list of entries can be found here, with further event information available on our event hub.