1995 FINA Short Course World Championships

The 2nd FINA Short Course World Championships were held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil from November 30 until December 3, 1995.

This event was considered a trailblazer in the aspect of the organization of major championships in Swimming. The innovation consisted in the introduction of the concept of purpose-built facilities for the event only.

Until the 1995 short course world championships, World Championships, in all pool lengths, were held at already-existing swimming pools, usually at clubs or facilities that had been built for previous sporting events. This limited the possibilities for organizers, especially in terms of making the event as attractive to the public and the media as possible.

For this event, the organizers built an outdoors, temporary swimming pool on the sands of the Copacabana beach (near the border with the neighbouring Leme beach). This initiative not only added to the aesthetic aspect of the event, by associating with it the natural beauty offered by the city of Rio de Janeiro, but it also created the possibility of making available, at smaller costs and in a much faster fashion, a facility that was much larger and more modern than anything that the city had to offer at the time.

Since then, recent Swimming events, such as the 2004 Short Course World Championships, held in Indianapolis, in the United States and the 2007 Long Course Championships, held in Melbourne, Australia, used the formula developed by the organizers of the 1995 Short Course Championships, by building temporary, purpose-built facilities for their respective events — in the case of the 2004 Short Course Championships in Indianapolis, the pool was assembled on top of a Basketball court, at a local team's gymnasium, and the organizing committee made repeated references to the "eye-opening event in Rio de Janeiro in 1995" in their decision of using a Basketball facility as the basis for the swimming facilities.

Men's Events

50 m Freestyle

400 m Freestyle

200 m Backstroke

100 m Butterfly

400 m Individual Medley

4×100 m Medley Relay

200 m Freestyle

100 m Breaststroke

200 m Backstroke

200 m Individual Medley

4×200 m Freestyle Relay

References

* [http://www.fina.org/pdf%20files/histoFina/HistoFINA_III_a.pdf HistoFINA]