At the 2021 European Championships on Wednesday, the men and women teamed up to compete in the 400 mixed medley relay. Mixed relays are a relatively new event in the pool, and this summer’s Tokyo Olympics will be the first Olympics to feature a mixed relay. Today presented another opportunity for the teams to place themselves in one of the four Wildcard spots for Tokyo.

As a reminder, the top 12 teams from the 2019 FINA World Championships have already automatically qualified for Tokyo. Four “Wildcard” spots remain for the fastest four teams during the qualifying period that ends. May 31, 2021. Teams can decline an invitation, leaving room for the next fastest team.

Editor’s Note: FINA does not officially publish an up-to-date rankings for the relay qualifiers, so we have done our best to manually compile the current rankings.

Before the Euro, China led the Wildcard contenders by 6 seconds or more thanks to their swimming world record in October. Japan were second in the Wildcard, followed by Brazil, which broke their national record and South American record in April. South Korea completed the Wildcard places. As these rankings relate to the current Euros, Switzerland, Denmark and Turkey were all hiding within three seconds of South Korea.

This week’s Euro relays saw a similar theme: a team not in one of the top eight Wildcard positions would move up the standings. Today would see France take its shot to qualify for Tokyo as Yohann Nodye Brouard, Théo Bussière, Marie Wattel, and Assia Toutai qualified fifth in the preliminaries with a new France record of 3: 46.39. This race put the French in the fourth and final Wildcard place.

Just behind France were Spain and Switzerland, both of which were less than half a second from the French.

The French made an interesting move to scratch Wednesday night’s final, dragging Belarus into the race. France scratching this relay could be seen in two ways: on the one hand, it is an event that is not valued or two, they do not believe they have a chance for a medal in this event.

Denmark moved up to the last “Out” position but as they did not qualify in the top eight they did not have the opportunity to swim again.

The rankings as the finals approach:

Even with France who scratched, they always kept that last place in the Wildcard before the final. Spain and Switzerland would both need to swim faster while getting ahead of the other teams to climb into one of the Wildcard spots.

Switzerland was able to do the job in the final because Roman Mityukov, Lisa Mamie, Noe Ponti, and Maria ugolkova set a new Swiss record in the relay clocking 3: 46.16, moving up to the fourth Wildcard position, knocking out France.

The complete classification of the 400 mixed medley relay after tonight’s session: