FINA (Fédération Internationale de Natation) has been staging the World Championships since 1973. At the first edition in Belgrade four disciplines – swimming, synchronised swimming, diving and men’s water polo – was part of the show. Open water swimming was added in 1986, together with the women’s water polo tournament, while high diving was staged for the first time in 2013.

 

The programme has been expanded from time to time, by 2015 the five individual discipline all featured mixed events and now the number of titles on offer stands at 75 and the number of participants nearly quadrupled during this almost half century.

 

Thanks to the global superstars, aquatics grew the top Olympic sport by 2021, thus the FINA World Championships are now among the top sport spectacles on the Globe, drawing billions of TV viewers and hundreds of millions of social media interactions – an amazing story how an event can develop into a relatively small meet in the 70s to a true global showcase by now.

 

The below table lists key data on the previous FINA World Championships – just click on the date of any World Championships and find out who were the heroes of the respective editions, who set world records or achieved historical feats.