The legacy of the Pan American Games is already beginning to bear fruit, as world swimming body FINA announces that Guadalajara will host the World Swimming Championships in 2017.
The announcement, made just before the start of the 14th world championships in Shanghai, comes less than a month after the inauguration of Guadalajara’s new aquatics center, which was built for the 2011 Pan American Games.
Adjacent to the new tennis complex in the Parque Metropolitano, the aquatics centre has a capacity of 3,593. To accommodate the larger audiences the championships will bring, another temporary swimming pool will be built next to the current facilities with at least 10,000 extra seats.
The championships will provide Guadalajara with a further boost to its growing tourist sector. Around 2,500 athletes from over 190 countries are expected to take part in the 15-day competition, which is expected to draw 200,000 spectators to the city, with an estimated worldwide television audience of 3.5 billion viewers.
Paola Espinosa, a Mexican diver who won a bronze medal in the 2008 Beijing Olympics and gold in the 2009 championships in Rome, described it as “a dream come true for a generation of athletes who have never seen the championships in this part of the world. It is an enormous opportunity to show the people here that aquatic sports are for them too.”
The last city to announce its candidacy, Guadalajara is fast becoming Mexico’s new sporting capital. Nearly one billion dollars has been spent on sporting infrastructure for October’s Pan American Games, an expenditure local politicians believe will allow Guadalajara to contend for major global events in the future.
Jalisco State Governor Emilio Gonzalez Marquez said the city could even mount a future bid to host the Olympics: “Two options could follow: either the Youth Olympics or a bid for the full Olympic Games. But I think we need to concentrate on the Pan American Games first in order to decide which path we should take.”
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