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Under which conditions are sportspeople eligible to compete at Universiade?

Additionally, I also wonder to which extent it is common that same person represents a country at both world championships and universiade.

I have tried to Google for universiade olympic medal site:wikipedia.org to see whether I find some people who won medals at both Universiade and Olympic games. Going through the first few pages of results of that search I have noticed Javier Sotomayor and Amanda Beard.

My guess is that this is less common in the most popular (and best paid) sports such as football, ice-hockey, basketball. (I suppose that not many players would risk injury at a less prestigious event. I am also not sure about the collision of the dates with other competitions; professional teams probably would not be willing to let an important team member to leave their professional team for Universiade.) However, I do not have any data to support this guess.

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Quoting from the site of FISU:

The Universiades and [World University] Championships are open to all student athletes that have not been out of university or an equivalent institution for more than a year, and that are aged between 17 and 28. Any association which is a member of FISU may enter a team or an individual competitor. Entries are accepted from any country eligible for the Olympic Games and from any national federation affiliated to the appropriate international federation.

In addition, the individual sports may have placed additional entry criteria on the participants in that sport (for example, a country can only delegate at most two athletes for most athletics events and both athletes must have achieved a certain minimum result in that event).

I can't comment on how common it is for athletes to compete both in a Universiade and a World Championship/Olympic Games.

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  • So, no requirement not to be a professionist?
    – o0'.
    Commented Apr 1, 2014 at 8:31
  • @Lohoris: I don't know the word 'professionist'. You don't have to be a professional athlete to compete at a Universiade and I believe that in many sports there aren't enough professional athletes to fill a decent field in the first place.
    – Bart van Ingen Schenau
    Commented Apr 1, 2014 at 8:49
  • I meant the opposite: I would have expected professional athletes to be barred from partecipating in the Universiades, and I was surprised it isn't so.
    – o0'.
    Commented Apr 1, 2014 at 10:33
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    @Lohoris: I apologize if I offended you, that was not my intention. I didn't know if I understood your comment correctly.
    – Bart van Ingen Schenau
    Commented Apr 1, 2014 at 10:40
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    @Lohoris: The problem with barring professional athletes is that it is very hard to properly define when an athlete is a non-professional. Under most definitions that have been used in the past, even receiving any prize money or a scholarship would have made you a professional athlete.
    – Bart van Ingen Schenau
    Commented Apr 1, 2014 at 10:44

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