Sources and sustainability of the cycle of high-performance competitive swimming in Serbia

Abstract

The subject of this paper concerns the nature of individual changes and the origin of organizational ones that have led to the progress and breakthrough results of competitive swimming in Serbia. Serbia's first swimming medals were won at the Olympic Games (OG), World Championships (WCh), and European Championships (ECh) in the senior and junior categories for both men and women, and the world and European records were set during the analyzed period (2000-2016). The Serbian male and female swimmers also marked the period concerned with winning the title of Serbia's best athletes in both senior and junior categories (2008 and 2009, 2010). Descriptive, structural, functional, and causal analysis of the facts related to this period of development of competitive swimming in the Republic of Serbia, as the method applied in this paper, led to the conclusion that the talent of an athlete, top coaches, in addition to new training practice, science, technology, innovation (NIT), SOFT programs, and the involvement of meso and macro levels of sports organization represent the factors relevant to the progress in individual performance as well as to the intensive growth of competitive swimming in the examined period. The limited capacities of competitive swimming have been determined in terms of the sustainability of the top competition results achieved. In this paper, the international and national cultural narrative of the men's 100m butterfly final at the Beijing 2008 Olympics (Čavić vs Phelps) was elaborated.