CMAS World Championships

[OceanMan]

CMAS World Championships are being held in Italy these days.

One French athlete, Christophe Bruel, has been disqualified because he did several AIDA competitions this year.

I have also read that there are only 16 athletes left for the competition !

Can someone confirm this ?

[hteas]

How can CMAS be hosting a freediving championship? I thought they threw freediving out the window, requiring the formation of AIDA to continue the sport?
Howard

[spaghetti]

OceanMan, yes unfortunately Cmas does not accept any athlete who has taken part to Aida competitions. This comes as no surprise: that's the official and well known Cmas rule and policy. We all must hope that this ban will be lifted some day because it doesn't make much sense.
Hteas: the american Cmas commitee actually is not doing any freediving AFAIK, same as the local Cmas commitees of many other countries.
BUT, in many European countries, Cmas has been organizing many international comps in the last years and it's making some interesting progress towards the sport. They're only for dynamics, statics and Jump Blue, while CW and other deep freediving specialties are banned, but hopefully the ban over Constant will be lifted ASAP.
These notes are just FYI: I'm no Cmas man.

[JPPLAY]

Just to add to information about CMAS banning athletes. CMAS banned all the spearfisherman from the FIPSA World Championship from being allowed to compete in their events. I hate seeing bully tactics like this. Hopefully something better will happen in the future. Maybe the FIPSA will take off. I also don't see how CMAS can gain control on freediving competitions over AIDA but I know very little about the political environment of freediving competitions. Does anyone have an idea why CMAS thinks they can gain complete control?

[trux]

I wonder when will someone finally challenge CMAS legally. Maybe AIDA could do it, asking for huge compensations. Such bullying behavior would not be tolerated in any other normal business. Try imaging Microsoft (one of the best known bullies), telling you that if you want to use Windows, you must not install any other software than from MS. Well, they already tried similar tactics, and still try new ways to do so, but they were also many times ordered by courts to lift such policies, and were quite harshly penalized for them.

Some may tell that the best way is ignoring CMAS and boycotting their competitions - that they will realize soon themselves that they are shooting them into the foot. I heard such opinions on other forums. Well, that may be possible in countries where CMAS has no importance, no influence, and no power, but in Italy, or even France (although the French federation FFESSM which is a branch of CMAS, is much more tolerable toward AIDA), and in other countries controlled by CMAS, by boycotting them, you can get into real troubles - since they control spearfishing, instructor, and also scuba licensing, they are in position to drive you out into the illegal side, where you'll be forced to dive or hunt illegally, and won't be able to make any commercial activities related to diving.

That's a clear abuse of their power and monopoly position, and not only something that we should boycott - we should fight against it actively, and cause them a huge financial loss at a court to make them rethink it the next time, before they introduce another such bullying policy (this is not the first and only time I hear about bullying from the side of CMAS).

If AIDA brought a legal suit against them, I am pretty sure they would win the process without big troubles and could gain nice compensations. I highly recommend that the officials consult a lawyer about that matter - I believe that most lawyers will be quite excited to jump on it. If not AIDA, then even individual freedivers could launch a class suit against CMAS - finally by being forced to chose between AIDA or CMAS, they may lose the possibility of better exposure and loss of eventual sponsoring contracts, so suing for financial compensations is rightly in place.

[spaghetti]

Originally Posted by JPPLAY

Does anyone have an idea why CMAS thinks they can gain complete control?

Why? Because Cmas is the official world federation of UW sports inside the International Olympic Commitee. You may raise one thousands reasonable objections to this point, too many too mention, but yet this is the point.
--
Back to the starting question of the thread: just 16 atheletes running? No. I see 40 athletes in the Jump Blue finals (Men's gold medal: turkish Devrim Ulusoy. Silver, italian Michele Tomasi. Bronze: Lorenzo Hidalgo, Venezuela. Women's gold medal: Karla Fabrio, Croatia, who also took part to Maribor Aida worlds last month, so I'm totally puzzled ). Today and tomorrow it's the turn of Dynamics.

[trux]

Not sure, but possibly it is only a participation on AIDA competitions with depth disciplines that counts for the disqualification. At least I see it as the only possible explanation. Not sure if Karla did any such competition though (in Maribor there was no depth, AFAIK).

[Goran Colak]

Ok, here is the thing. I just arive home in Croatia from Bari and I was competitior there in apnea.

The ban for AIDA competitors is just for the same discipline, so in this case just DYN couse that's only thing that CMAS and AIDA both have. Both Karla Fabrio and me was DQ from DYN and culd not compete. No mether that we both set CMAS WR in DYN two month before that. So yeah CMAS sucks, they have DQ athlets from Venecuela, France, Mexico and us from Croatia... wery, wery frustrating and shity desicion... We will take that to the Int Olimpic Comete for shure, the Franch have already agree!

Yust to let you know, both, Karla and me ware haveing AIDA T-sirt on, all the time And manny people was heveing positive aditude to that....

[JPPLAY]

I am glad to hear that organizations will be taking their cases to the Olympic Committee. I wonder what the policy of the committee is towards this type of behaviour.

[Goran Colak]

Me to, but honestly I do not think that we will change anything.... we ware there, and that organisation and presendent Ferero have no interest at all to develop apnea and change the rule... We will try but there is little chanse for any progres... To be compleatly honest, there is big chanse for things to become even worse!

[spaghetti]

Yes in facts it will be a good thing if the IOC will asked to take a position in this situation. As a matter of fact, the world's strongest freedivers are out of Cmas competition and it's reasonable to say that this is not a good thing for the sport and for Cmas itself.
Meanwhile, the meeting has come to conclusion and, after Jump Blue, we have the newly Cmas world champions in Dynamics too.
Performances are below Aida wordls in Maribor, but still not bad:
Men's Gold Medal: Michele Tomasi, Italy, m.194,96
Women' Gold Medal: Natalia Babich, Russia, m.195,02
That's all folks

[shoutatthesky]

F--K CMAS. F--K IOC. Long live FREEDIVING for the joy of FREEDIVING. Stop the petty squabbles and get on with the greater good. Hats off to AIDA. They are the only one that seem to be doing Freediving any good.
Jump blue? What a joke

Right - got that off my chest.

[Daić]

Goran, do you know how many competitours and countries wer there? Where can I see the resolts?

Jure

[mgm]

CMAS - Apnée

[sanso]

Originally Posted by shoutatthesky

F--K CMAS. F--K IOC. Long live FREEDIVING for the joy of FREEDIVING. Stop the petty squabbles and get on with the greater good. Hats off to AIDA. They are the only one that seem to be doing Freediving any good.
Jump blue? What a joke

Right - got that off my chest.

Thanks for venting
Apart from the many dashes and capitalisation in that post, I'd like to second this. Banning people for whatever they do in their spare time is ridiculous - CMAS might as well ban left-handed or red-headed people. (or left-handed redheads, for that matter )

This kind of stuff looks a bit like the boxing world to me, where there's about 48 World Champions™ at all times and people who know the phone number of someone in a different club get their pets tortured until they promise to forget that number and feel really bad about it.

From what I've seen, AIDA much acts like an organisation for competitive freediving. All the stuff taught in their courses points to competitive freediving and that is okay with me as long as I have the possibility to learn their stuff and am able to look into other things as well.

There is a still young and small organisation growing into the field of apnea, the IDIC - The Apnea branch is still in the process of taking shape and I think one can make a major difference there, that's why I chose to become IDIC Apnea Instructor. Let's see what happens there - I'm very curious.