4-time world gold medalist Giorgio Minisini introduced he is retiring after no man was picked to compete in Paris 2024 synchronised swimming out of 96 athletes.
No males will compete in synchronised swimming on the Olympics, regardless of Paris 2024 vowing to be the primary gender-equal version within the historical past of the Video games.
The 96 athletes picked by 18 completely different nations for the Olympics had been all girls.
In 2022, World Aquatics modified the principles, permitting as much as two males to be chosen in an eight-athlete synchronised swimming squad.
“World Aquatics may be very upset that no male inventive swimmers have been chosen for Paris 2024” they informed Euronews in an announcement.
“This could have been a landmark second for the game. We perceive that it might all the time be a problem for males to earn a spot on a staff in time for Paris 2024, contemplating that their eligibility was solely confirmed 18 months in the past, however we had been nonetheless hopeful that some would succeed.”
Neither World Aquatics nor the Worldwide Olympic Committee have a say on the picks, as they’re all the time determined by the person nationwide federations.
With no males picked for Paris, four-time world gold medalist Giorgio Minisini mentioned he was competing for the final time at age 28.
“Obsession is a younger man’s sport,” Minisini, who was left off the Italian Olympic staff in April, wrote on his Instagram account Tuesday.
Minisini and Invoice Might of the US had been the 2 most probably Olympic pioneers aiming to be picked for Paris as the primary males to compete in inventive swimming.
The game debuted on the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics as synchronised swimming.
Minisini specialises within the combined duet occasion, which isn’t but on the Olympic program and missed choice for the staff occasion.
Might was on the US staff that gained silver and bronze medals in staff acrobatic routine on the previous two world championships. At age 45, he didn’t make the Olympic staff final month.
“All of us within the inventive swimming neighborhood have to work even tougher to progress alternatives for male athletes within the sport,” mentioned World Aquatics, which hopes so as to add a combined duet occasion for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
Girls’s Olympic participation greater than doubled in 40 years
Again in March, the Worldwide Olympic Committee (IOC) mentioned they’d set a 50/50 quota for women and men to compete within the Video games.
“We’re about to have a good time one of the crucial essential moments within the historical past of ladies on the Olympic Video games, and in sport general,” mentioned IOC President Thomas Bach.
Girls’s participation on the Olympics has greater than doubled over the previous 40 years, from 22.9% on the 1984 Los Angeles video games to 50% on the Paris 2024 ones.
On this yr’s summer season video games, 28 out of 32 sports activities shall be absolutely gender equal, the IOC mentioned.
There may even be “a extra gender-balanced variety of medal occasions, with 152 girls’s occasions, 157 males’s occasions and 20 mixed-gender occasions.”
