The retreat, the disappointment and the bright spot: Summary of the European Swimming Championships

The European Swimming Championships concluded last night in Paris, but the Israeli delegation finished its journey in the morning. It was a representative summary of the disappointing performance of the team, which did not win a medal for the first time since the 2018 European Championships, and only scraped a few finals here and there. Anastasia Gorbenko, who arrived as a three-time consecutive European champion in the 200m individual medley, finished only seventh in the final this time, as did Aviv Barzelay in the 200m backstroke and the 4x200m freestyle relay team.

The only one who really starred relative to expectations is Tomer Schuster, who finished fifth in the 50m backstroke and broke Israeli records that had stood for ten and nine years respectively in this event and the 100m backstroke. It is impossible not to be impressed by the improvement in the 22-year-old swimmer since the previous continental championship. Schuster, who grew up in Moshav Talmei Yafe in the Gaza Envelope, trained until October 7 at the Hapoel Negev Swimmers group. The evacuation of residents from the south led him to move to train at Maccabi Rishon LeZion, where he made the exceptional leap during his military service as an outstanding athlete.

The World Championships next year will be a good opportunity to test his progress against strong swimmers from the USA and Australia. The other side of the coin is Anastasia Gorbenko, on whom the eyes of the delegation were fixed. There is no doubt that she is showing a worrying decline in ability at the age of 23, after a year of change in which she replaced her training center and moved from Israel to the University of Louisville in Kentucky. It was not just the placement in the finals, but the results that were very far from those she had already set in the past.

In an interview she gave to Ynet a month ago, she spoke about leaving her comfort zone — but also declared her expectation to win the European title for the fourth time: "Maintaining the place is much more challenging than reaching it. The goal is to keep the title, even if I haven't approached my record for two years." Although her preparation for the competition was high quality, it seems that the load she experienced this year affected her greatly. We need to wait and see if the second year in college will help her get back on track.

At the championship two years ago, the team reached the podium nine times, but this was largely a false impression: the world top was preparing for the Olympic Games, so many swimmers took advantage of the rare opportunity. Perhaps to prevent unfounded euphoria, the team coach Leonid Kaufman has already declared that the team will not participate in the next European Championship in 2028, which is supposed to take place during the summer of the Los Angeles Olympics. The next big competition is the World Championships to be held next summer in Budapest.