By Braden Keith on SwimSwam
Up minutes after publishing this article, the ISL also posted to their Instagram story, indicating a more active level of management that undermines the theory that this could have been an accidental post.
The International Swimming League has stirred from its slumber.
Almost three years after its last post on Instagram, the ISL dropped a classic ISL post on Tuesday morning, saying “There’s more to swimming than podiums and medals. At ISL we believe in giving swimmers real career stability, fair pay, respect and a chance to thrive as individuals and teammates. Dive into how we’re putting athletes first.”
includes in the caption a link to an article boasting about the new format and “guaranteed salaries” and “economic security,” though it is still unclear if all athletes were ultimately paid the money owed to them from prior seasons.
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The ISL was founded by Russian-Ukrainian billionaire Konstantin Grigorishin in 2019. While the league developed an innovative format and prize pool that attracted many of the world’s top swimmers, including to a ‘bubble’ season during the COVID-19 pandemic, most of the staff were of the old guard in swimming and played many of the classic ‘old swimming’ games, hampering the growth and publicity of the league.
The fourth season was eventually cancelled when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 tied up Grigorishin’s assets, leaving him unable to fund the league’s enormous budget amid a very small pool of revenue. The league tried to diversify its investment and staff by bringing in Ben Allen and Matt Dawe, who were having success in cryptocurrency and crypto-adjacent industries. The crypto-bubble popped, though, and the league went mostly silent aside from occasional news of payments to athletes, of the business dealings of Grigorishin amid the war, and of the league-funded lawsuit against World Aquatics.
But rumors of a small group of insiders plotting the league’s return have persisted through the silence, and the moment might be right for the return. The ISL had the most anti-Enhanced Games, draconian approach to doping, with a ‘one strike’ policy leading to lifetime bans (even, at times, when other anti-doping organizations accepted explanations of accidental positive tests). As the conversation of swimming turns toward how to create livelihoods for swimmers when the Olympic pipeline fails them financially, the ISL’s model of base salaries to a large pool of professional swimmers could be equally tempting.
But the fundamentals of the ISL still remain that a huge budget couldn’t move the needle on revenue in a sustainable way, and now the added uphill battle of distrust of the league both from athletes and the public.
But the sport is showing a genuine appetite for change, even if all of those changes haven’t been wildly popular, and the format of the ISL was popular, on paper.
If the league is able to adopt a more nimble and efficient business model and take a more media-friendly approach to publicity, there could be a kernel to grow around for a revived league. If nothing else, the Enhanced Games have proven at a minimum that swimmers can be bought away from the Olympic dream. Undermining the Olympic Games were an early target of ISL leadership, though that narrative pretty quickly faded from the public mission of the league, and the right set of circumstances might now be in place to bring the league back together.
The tease is enough to tickle some imaginations, as evidenced by the immediate response to the social media posts.
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