Every Freediving Competition on One Map: the New FreediveRanking Events Calendar

Where is the next competition you could get to? Which pool hosts the most static comps? Where was that depth event you dived ten years ago? Until now, answering any of these on FreediveRanking.com meant scrolling a long list.

Not anymore. The new events page puts every AIDA and CMAS competition on a calendar and on a world map — each one pinned at the pool, the bay or the blue hole where it actually happens.

The map comes first

Open freediveranking.com/events and the map is the first thing you see, showing the next six months. Each pin shows its dates; where several competitions are close together, they merge into a bubble with a number. The dot colour tells you the type: blue for depth, green for pool.

Scroll or pinch to zoom in and the bubbles split apart into single venues. Competitions held at the same pool or dive site share one pin, so a busy place like Dahab or Kalamata reads as what it is — a freediving hub.

Click a pin and the list next to the map narrows down to the competitions held there. Each card shows the venue, the dates and the federation, plus a LIVE badge while a competition is running and a RESULTS badge once it is over.

Made for your phone

Most of us look for competitions on a phone — on the bus, between pool sessions, at the airport. So on mobile the map takes the whole screen, and the list slides up from the bottom as a sheet you can drag.

Tap a bubble and the sheet shows just the competitions in that spot — here, ten events around the Red Sea, from a static comp in Eilat to the World Cup in Sharm el-Sheikh.

Search like you book a trip

The search bar on top works the way travel sites do:

• Where — type a country, a town or a competition name. Pick several countries if you are flexible.
• When — choose one month, a few months (they don't have to be next to each other) or a single day.
• Discipline — depth, pool or both. More filters let you pick AIDA or CMAS.

On a phone, tap the search pill and it opens full screen. Start typing and suggestions come in three groups: countries, upcoming competitions and past ones.

Found something you like? Tap the heart to save it — your saved competitions wait for you under Saved. And the bell sends you an email when a new competition matching your filters is added.

Explore the past, too

The map is not only about what is coming. FreediveRanking keeps competitions going back to the 1990s, and search reaches all of them. Type Vertical Blue and, even though there is no edition in the coming months, you get every past one — with results — under Other dates.

Prefer dates over places? Switch to Calendar for the whole year month by month, with a count of competitions in each month and a coloured dot for every competition day. Use the arrows to step back through earlier years.

How 4,000+ competitions found their place

A map is only as good as its pins. And here was the catch: most competitions in the database had a location written as free text — "Limassol bay, Limassol, Cyprus", "Deans Blue Hole" — or no location at all. No coordinates. 4,444 competitions (4,259 AIDA and 185 CMAS), the oldest from 1993, needed a point on the map.

Placing them by hand would take weeks. So we built a small pipeline, with Claude doing the reading and OpenStreetMap doing the checking:

1. Group. Many competitions share a venue, so 4,444 events boiled down to about 1,500 distinct places. One answer per place, not per event.
2. Read. Claude labelled each place down to the town — and for competitions with no location at all, worked out the place from the name. "Rab Dive Off 2009" or "10th La Ciotat Indoor" give the town away.
3. Look it up. For AIDA competitions with an empty location, we went back to the event pages on aidainternational.org and filled in 94 missing locations.
4. Verify. Every proposed point was checked against OpenStreetMap: does this spot really sit in the town and country we think it does? Uncertain labels were geocoded again from scratch.
5. Research the rest. The tricky leftovers got a proper web search — old results pages, club websites, deeperblue.com news — and a place was accepted only when a source tied that edition to a town.

The result: almost 4,000 competitions now sit at their real venue — about nine in ten. The rest are mostly very old national events with no trace online, plus 148 individual world-record attempts that we left out on purpose. Those still show on the map, placed in the middle of their country until we know better. New competitions get their coordinates as they are added.

Is your competition missing?

AIDA competitions arrive on their own, but not every competition does. If yours is not on the map, add it through the Report Missing Event form — you'll also find it under Events calendar → Add event.

Here is what it asks for:

• The basics — event name, federation, event type, start and end date.
• Location — town and country, e.g. "Dahab, Egypt". The more precise, the better the pin.
• A link — the official AIDA event page for AIDA competitions, or the website or registration page for anything else.
• Results — if the competition is already over, attach the complete official results: every day and every athlete, not only your own dives. Rankings are calculated across all results, so partial ones can't be published. A PDF, spreadsheet or photo is fine — one file per day, or one for the whole event.
• Your email — so we can get back to you with questions.

We review every report before the competition goes on the calendar and on the map.

Already listed, but sitting in the middle of a country or in the wrong town? Let us know — one message is often enough to place a whole series of editions.

Then go and have a look around: freediveranking.com/events. Your next competition might be closer than you think.

Follow along

There is more coming — for the ranking and for the app. To hear about it first, follow us on Instagram:

• @freediveranking_com — competitions, results and new features on FreediveRanking.
• @freediver_app — training tips and updates from the Freediver App.