Results from World Masters Championships

By Phillip Whitten

PHOENIX, June 5. MANY of our readers have sent e-mail messages asking why we hadn't posted any results yet from the FINA World Masters Championships in Riccione, Italy.

Good question.

The problem has been that the meet organizers reportedly decided to compile the full results at the end of the meet, print and sell them. For that reason they also decided not to post results anywhere on the Internet or even give them to Pete Andersen, our accredited representative — in fact, the only accredited press from anywhere in the world at the meet.

This decision was entirely unacceptable to us, and we have conveyed that message to the organizers through Pete and our good friends in the Italian swimming federation. Results of competition, we believe, do not constitute proprietary information. The information should be entirely in the public domain.

Furthermore, we argued, the folks who likely would buy a full, printed compilation of the meet's results — primarily, the more than 8,000 competitors in Riccione — are likely to do so regardless of whether or not they appear on the Internet. Conversely, people who access the Internet to get the results are unlikely to buy the full, printed results, whether or not they are successful in finding them online.

So making results available on line, we argued, will not decrease the sale of the full, printed results, and will increase goodwill.

Our arguments may have met with success. Today, the Riccione organizing committee released the first place results for each event and each age group. We posted the results with Pete's story from Day One, and shortly will do the same with Day Two.

It's a start….

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