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Sixteenth FINA World Sports Medicine Congress

The 16th FINA World Sports Medicine Congress (WSMC) was held in Manchester, England on 7th and 8th April, 2008 in advance of the extremely successful and theatrical 9th FINA World Short Course Swimming Championships. This was the third occasion that the FINA WSMC had been held in the UK with London hosting the very first Congress in 1969 and the 8th in 1989. FINA justifiably prides itself on being one of the few International Sports Federations that has a policy of information and knowledge exchange designed to support all 194 FINA Member National Federations in their quest for healthy athletes and equality of opportunity between all competitors. Manchester’s aspirations in hosting the Congress were to make it the biggest and best ever. The Congress theme was Optimising Performance and Promoting Health and 30 world leading academic figures in the field of sport and aquatics presented keynote papers that guaranteed an innovative and cutting-edge educational programme for over 200 delegates. The first presentation, the Bleasdale Memorial Lecture, featured Prof Arne Ljunqvist, who is the Chairman of the IOC Medical Commission. His vision provided detail about ‘Protecting the Health of the Athlete: A Joint Commitment of the IOC Medical Commission and WADA’. Subsequent presentations considered the most important medical issues and all of the relevant sport science disciplines that affect elite athletes. The final day uniquely featured the very real health risks related to physical inactivity and the important role that aquatics can play in improving the health of all of the nations of the world. There was also an exciting programme of original research delivered in 18 podiums and 23 poster presentations from around the world. These presentations featured both young and established researchers and, for the first time, the Cameron Award was made for the best presentation of original work at the Congress. The winner was Argyris G. Toubekis from Democritus University of Thrace, Greece who made an outstanding podium presentation entitled ‘Repeated Sprint Swimming Performance after Low or High Intensity Active and Passive Recoveries’. For the first time in the history of the Congress, delegates were invited to engage in pool-side demonstrations and population health workshops. The former proved to be a major success and well worth repeating in the future, despite the organisational challenges, while the latter led to a final plenary session involving a Panel of Experts responding to delegates’ policy and practice recommendations regarding Promoting Population Health through Aquatics. Another FINA WSMC first was the production of an electronic Book of Proceedings including all Keynote presentations and a 4-page summary of the Podium and Poster presentations. This will be available on-line via the FINA and Manchester 2008 websites. The 32 abstracts presented below have been accepted by a multi-disciplinary review team on behalf of the Journal of Sports Sciences and reflect all aspects of the Congress. These abstracts were submitted by Keynote, Podium and Poster presenters from the relevant aquatic medicine and science disciplines.