Is a 'slow' swimming pool impeding world records?
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1. The depth - which is only 7ft in Paris, unusually shallow for a competition pool.
2. The sides. Does the water spill over the sides into the gutters, or smash into a wall and bounce back, creating more chop.
A trained eye can see all the swimmers in Paris struggling in their last 10-20 meters (heck, an untrained eye can spot some of these). Bummer that it makes the meet feel slow but at least it generally affects all the swimmers equally
The setup was simple - a constant head vessel to provide a constant but adjustable flow of water in from one end, and a little plastic boat sat in the middle of the channel, attached to a force gauge at one end of the channel. The outflow of the channel had a gate with an adjustable height in order to vary the depth. Also, a couple of dye injectors at different heights in the channel in order to see turbulent vs laminar flow.
The key finding was that at shallower depths, turbulent flow began much more rapidly and resulted in erratic but overall higher resistive forces on the boat. Deep water remained laminar for much longer, and could flow much faster before turning turbulent near the surface. This was the expected result, but it was nice to experimentally prove it.
So in short, the pool depth almost certainly impacts the point at which turbulence kicks in, and therefore athletic performance. It’s probably the dive/entry that is being most impeded, as that’s when the swimmer will largely be experiencing laminar flow.
I’d have entire days of experiments screwed up just by the water being slightly too warm or cold, or there being dust, or not enough dust, or sunshine, or… fluid dynamics are finicky.
the difference of the resulting turbulence from the wave bounced back from the bottom surface at 2m here and from the more traditional 3m is a big deal. The water is pushed by the swimmer's hands with the speed of something on the scale of 2 meters per second, so, as the swimmer moves forward, that turbulent movement of the water reflected by the pool bottom may as well come behind the legs in the 3m depth case while in the 2m depth case it would catch the legs decreasing the efficiency of their movement.
The Titmus vs Sanders vs Ledecky 400m could have been a world record race in another pool, but there's a pretty good chance we'll never see the three of them race each other again.
In Ledecky's case the clock is the only competition, and she's just so much better than anyone else it's currently impossible for someone to race her.
In Athletics at non-Championship meets they have pacemakers who provide a pace for the eventual winners to chase when they are going for fast times.
It'd be interesting to see what Ledecky could do if she swam (for example) with male pacemakers as competition.
Or maybe Summer Sanders will move up to the 1500m and we'll see a real race before Ledecky retires.
The Olympics used to be held at Olympia. It's not difficult to make the conditions the same every four years.
That way, there's no circus that goes around at great expense each time, and the Olympic city becomes a centre for sports science during the interim.
Perhaps have separate summer and winter cities.
Only drawback is the ioc doesn't get to choose a city every four years.
If there is no big event happening somewhere, the Olympic have no point. There are already permanent venues and international competitions happening for each of the sports of the Olympic.
That’s a massive drawback which is probably insurmountable.
They to love kickback.
In earlier times, measuring equipment wasn't accurate enough, so races had to be done in parallel with people starting at the same time. Today, that's no longer necessary. In fact, people racing one after another is exactly how we hand out world records.
Of course, the Olympics and other events like them aren't there to find the best athletes in some absolute sense; these events are there to entertain spectators. Otherwise, swimmers could just do time trials at home and mail in times.
And spectators like people racing each other at the same time.
Additionally, it would make races take 8x to 10x amount of time.
Yes, it's more fun.
> Additionally, it would make races take 8x to 10x amount of time.
Well, that's not a problem, they can run different events in parallel. Eg swimming and running shouldn't interfere at all with each other.
They already run events in parallel.
While that's technically true, the drafting effect actually means that being a bit more than a body length behind the swimmer next to you is beneficial to you. That's another part of the philosophy why the fastest swimmers are assigned the center lanes, and the slowest the outermost lanes, to balance out the choppiness of being by the sides with creating a potential for drafting. Of course intentionally drafting is not a strategy that will win you the race, especially in short events, but in longer events it can be important to keep pace with the swimmer next to you while they need to expend more energy and you draft off of them either with the intention to eventually pass them or to stay ahead of the swimmers on your outside.
In cases where there are less swimmers than lanes, they leave the edge lanes empty.
Putting the faster qualifiers in the middle lanes is also a better view for the spectators on both sides of the pool.
Olympic and similar competitions are timed to the nearest 1,000th of a second, but any result within the same 100th is considered a tie as that last bit is just entirely arbitrary, in part because pool dimensions themselves are not accurate to this degree. (The FINA standards mentioned in my earlier comment addresses dimensions accuracy standards.) The Olympics did break ties at the 1/1,000s standard in 1972, but has since judged any result within 1/100th as a tie:
<https://olympstats.com/2014/02/12/timing-accuracy-at-the-oly...>
I would be very surprised if they re-use it at all - an "above ground" pool of that size seems like it would be more trouble than it's worth to maintain over the long run.
A timelapse of the pool being put together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTuFidqy0yI
There's a lot in the book Soccernomics about how the economic value promised by politicians lobbying for hosting things like this rarely pan out.
A more interesting way of doing the Olympics would be to only allow for developing countries to participate in the selection process. Each country would be required to meet a certain level of funding to guarantee they can support the entire Olympics. Foreign investment would be encouraged. There would be a requirement for some aspects to be permanent construction, you couldn't just build a tent city for the athlete village. Then a name is picked randomly. The host country then receives major foreign investment, not just in sporting arenas, but in many areas of its economy. The Olympic committee could also collect dues from participating countries based on GDP that would go to the host country for economic development. It would basically create a lottery system for the economy of developing countries. The build up to the Olympics would create the infrastructure needed for future investment. This would likely require host cities to be selected much further out in advance. An oversight committee would observe the development and if milestones are not met, a host city from a developed country that does have the infrastructure necessary would instead be chosen.
If so, I guess this would be a serious competition only thing because you wouldn’t want them off for hours.
<https://resources.fina.org/fina/document/2022/02/08/77c3058d...> (PDF)
Most competitive swimming pools have a large number of inlets with diffusers on them, laid out every 2m or so across the pool floor.
Those are circular disks about 10cm in diameter, looking vaguely like this:
__________
\________/
| |
^^^^^^
Because the gutters are continuously removing water from the pool, circulation needs to be on to maintain a consistent fill level.
Maybe it's just the swimmers and not the pool as such
Plus, they are the worldwide foremost experts on competitive swimming. Definitely I would be more interested in their evaluation of a swimming pool rather than trust "research results" from the company that built the pool in question.
On swimming, sure. But not fluid dynamics. It's a bit like music listeners shouldn't be treated as experts on music quality, or you'll get the audiophile nuts who need gold connectors. Some combination of personal experience for comfort and objective measurements for performance would be much better.
Silver corrodes relatively quickly and is expensive; that's a bad tradeoff against copper, which is much cheaper and nearly as conductive. So: gold-plated connectors on copper wires are extremely common.
None of that makes an audible difference, as it turns out: humans can't tell the difference between silver, copper, gold, aluminum, or even iron wires at audio frequencies and realistic (sub-kilometer) lengths with comparable resistance. All the advantages are material costs vs longevity without maintenance.
Also, most music listeners are not experts on music quality or sound reproduction quality (two very different things). Many music listeners are experts on their own preferences. Everyone is entitled to their own preferences.
It’s not strange at all. Gold plating improving quality sounds truthy but is absolutely false. I have yet to read a serious study, at least single blind, showing any meaningful difference. And I have yet to read a serious engineering study showing any meaningful difference in characteristics. Steel plated jacks are just fine, and optical connectors make the whole thing irrelevant. As you write yourself:
> None of that makes an audible difference, as it turns out
> Also, most music listeners are not experts on music quality or sound reproduction quality (two very different things). Many music listeners are experts on their own preferences. Everyone is entitled to their own preferences.
Indeed. But their preference have no effect on Physics. If they are happy to get gold-plated ruthenium cables with diamond coatings, more power to them. It does not make these cables any better.
Theo are entitled to their own preferences, not their own reality.
Actually, gold is a worse conductor than both copper and silver, and only a little better than aluminum.
> and does not corrode in air
This is the real reason for plating contacts in gold. But gold wires would be a bad idea, since they would be worse than both copper and silver wires.
But they are very prone to psychological effects.
Some kind of placebo effect or fear of coming to close to the ground.
Many athletes are superstitious.
People are going absolutely as hard as they can.
There's no way an Olympic pool for the actual Olympics should be that shallow. If athletes prefer a deep pool, the pool should be deep.
Swimming is one of the premier sports at Olympics. It's also a facility that has one of the most reuse if built properly.
You don't think a Paris aquatic center wouldn't get tons of reuse in world championships and other types of top end level events if they'd built a fast pool
It's a mystifying decision. Especially since one of the standout athletes on the French Olympic team is a swimmer, and it appears that their decision now cheap out on the pool cost him a world record on the Olympic stage on his home soil
Firstly, if a swimmer were to wrongly worry about hitting the floor even if there is 0% that any of their races ever saw them go as low as this floor, it could be in the back of their mind that going as low as they usually do might cause them problems and therefore seem logical to avoid.
Secondly, humans are not perfectly rational machines. Many a football (soccer for any Americans) player has come back from a nasty injury and found themselves unable to play as boldly as they used to, even though the odds of getting injured haven't changed just their perception of it.
I do agree that if the athletes feel it's needed then they should be listened to, just explaining that it's possible for both things to be true, that the depth doesn't create any physical problems yet still lead to changed behaviour from the swimmers.
But it seems unlikely all swimmers would be impacted equally by psychological effects. Some thrive some wither, lots of variation.
They didn't build a dedicated aquatic center. "The pool here in suburban Paris — a temporary vessel plopped into a rugby stadium"
Paris allegedly spend 1.5 billion to clean up the Seine presumably for fringe events like open water swimming and triathlon.
Again: premier top-of-program sport in Olympics primetime. All they had to do was dig a hole in a rugby field.
Not necessarily. If they think the pool is slower, they’ll think they will have to swim for a bit longer, and may (possibly subconsciously) adjust their power output to allow for having something left when they have swum for as long as they think it would take them in a fast pool.
The Athens 2004 and Rio 2016 venues in particular are not doing very well post-Games.
They don't have to outswim the bear. They just have to outswim the silver medalist.
Perhaps this is why its shallower than normal.
Paris is swimming in a rugby stadium. It is loud and exciting. The US trials this year were in a temporary pool at the NFL stadium in Indianapolis with 60,000 seats filled! LA 2028 has already announced that they will be using a temporary pool in an NFL stadium and will have 38,000 seats. Brisbane 2032 hasn’t said anything as far as I’ve heard, but you can bet that’s also what they will do.
Edit - I was wrong about LA swimming capacity. It is going to be at the NFL stadium in Inglewood, but as of now they are only aiming for 38,000 seats
The current plan is a temporary pool in a new inner-city arena (15k seats) for the major swimming events, with diving, artistic swim and water polo prelims at an existing (to be refurbished) sports centre.
The building was going to need structural modifications to make the pool standard depth.
BTW, it's not clear the decision was purely monetary. Raising the water level means ruining the view of the closest seats. The spectators would be that much further away.
Edit: maybe I’m not making myself clear:
I don’t doubt they are slower in the current pool than they were before. But I doubt they can accurately tell you that it’s because of the pool depth. There are other factors that could also influence the performance, and I’m not sure the swimmers can accurately determine which factor is the primary difference.
Australia, as one example, took swimming (and a few other sports) next level with a plethora of studies on all things performance related.
Any theorectical results from, say, CFD, would be parallel tested in real conditions and|or modelled in a scale pool (like a wind tunnel for water).
Those who competed at that level in sport in the larger countries almost certainly heard first hand bleeding edge results from cutting edge sport science.
My niece was not fast enough to be invited to the trials this year (missed by .03 seconds in her favorite event), but her time would have put her into the second heat in Paris. She's the ~150th fastest person in the USA, but would have come in ~25th place in the Olympics. It's the same situation in China, Australia, Canada, UK, etc.
Most countries only have a small handful of elite swimmers. The power nations can each provide 20-50 swimmers fast enough to get to the semi-finals in every single event. They're analyzing and optimizing for everything. This is why most of the elite swimmers not from these countries go and train in the powerhouse countries. And why the powerhouse countries don't care that they do. I'd bet that 90% of all the medal winners this year do their training in 5 countries.
Venue shopping might feel ick, but I don't think it's too bad if you're in the competitive envelope, as opposed to what's perhaps a tradition of less then competitive entrants in some events.
This is a weird standard. Out of 200 people doing anything, how many do you expect to set a personal record? Say you drive to the grocery store. Are you setting a time record for the trip more than 0.5% of the time?
Tbh I don't do much of that sort of thing for my grocery store trips at all.
The only way this could actually happen is if they intentionally sandbag their performance starting several years in advance -- and continuing indefinitely -- which would prevent them from qualifying for the Olympics in the first place. It's not a possibility.
Every Olympic athlete, with the possible exception of the Jamaican bobsled team, has been equally motivated at dozens or hundreds of officially-measured points in the recent past. Why do we expect personal records at the Olympics?
And athletes are competent enough to achieve the time needed for qualification without going all-out. Look at the finish times of the heats. Pan Zhanle was over a second slower.
Edit: for example, compare salt and fresh water properties here: https://ittc.info/media/4048/75-02-01-03.pdf#page2
At 25 degrees, fresh water has a Viscosity of 0.000890 Pa⋅s and sea water has 0.000959 Pa⋅s. That’s an 8% difference in viscosity by adding NaCl to water. Is it that strange that there could be a 1% difference in viscosity for example by having different additives in the pool water?
Your English is actually very, very good! I wouldn't have guessed that it is a second language for you.
I have these data points:
1) The pool is shallower than normal in this Olympic
2) The pool seems to be slower this Olympic
3) swimmers seem to think it’s because the shallower depth
4) people responsible for building the pool say the effect of depth is negligible
5) there are other things that can be different about the pool except depth because the pools aren’t strictly standardized in their properties
My only claim was that point 3 doesn’t tell me a lot because I find it very plausible that you can’t really detect the reason for the slowness just from swimming. I don’t have positive proof of that though.
It will get you a fair amount of the way there, but at some point you have to go and actually do the thing to validate your model.
The how can be argued
Would a large, blind empirical study be more trustworthy?
I am aware the above may be proportionality bias, but at the same time there is some kind of "reverse proportionality bias" at play here: the assumption that since the effect of a shallow pool are too small, they can't significantly affect the athletes. Human behaviours are very nonlinear, and even very small sensory inputs may very well "throw off" an experienced swimmer.
Like this reminds me of Beckham/Ronaldo doing free kicks. They had a deep understanding of controlling the ball well beyond what scientists knew how to measure and explain what they're doing.
The gold standard would be an empirical randomized controlled trial to compare two pools, assuming you could hide “which pool” from the participants.
As a swimmer, I remember everyone lauding over how cool the Beijing Water Cube was because it was a uniform 3m deep which made it excellent for racing in - this was 16 years ago in 2008.
Since the Paris Olympics were accepted the regulation recommendation for pool depth has been revised from 2m to 2.5m
So clearly people vested in the sport and live and breathe it have seen enough evidence (including the sleepy regulatory board) to advise deeper pools.
If you wanted another possible explanation for how depth may affect the swim - a crucial part of the swim is the dive and also the underwater kicking. Both of those may have separate dynamics to swimming on the surface.
On some swimming forums competitors were complaining about the bidding process for the pool construction and giving a different opinion, noting that the depth is less than what was recommended by international standards bodies. There's also something about video equipment at the bottom of the pool?
I'm not sure what to think, as there are things to consider both ways, but there's a bit more out there than swimmers versus pool officials.
Temporary pools seem to be thing recently. The US trials were held in one.
And if you don’t like inferring causation, one could just directly perform an experiment to test this pool vs another pool using swimmers who didn’t quite make the Olympics.
How the pool gutters neutralizes or doesn’t neutralize waves; water temperature; the design of the lane lines; design of the starting block; the electronic touch sensors(how hard are they - do you get a good solid feel for push off?); etc
Depth is probably only part of the reason the pool is slow. It would be very unlikely everyone happens to be slow at the Olympics this year.
Two examples of technique I'm aware of are the Fosbury Flop (1968) in the high jump, in which the jumper goes backwards over the bar (previously jumpers had gone forwards and feet-first, by 1968 with a sissors step), and heads-down technique in Australian Crawl "freestyle" swimming. Both dramatically improved results.
The Fosbury Flop was enabled by the technological introduction of foam mats on the landing side of the high-jump. Without mats, landing on your back after clearing a 2m+ bar position was somewhat undesirable.
Heads-down stroke in freestyle was in conjunction with freshwater (rather than salt) in swimming pools. Swimming heads-down without goggles in a salt-water pool burns the eyes quite strongly. With freshwater, and acrylic plastic goggles (acrylic being invented in the Great Plastics Boom of the 1930s). I'm not entirely sure when plastic swim goggles became widespread, though it may not have been until the 1970s, and the Montreal Olympics (1976) were the first to permit goggles.
Track generally has also seen tremendous improvements in the track composition (loose cinders to rubberised surface). Swimming pools have hugely reduced wave action through wave-absorbing lane lines, deep gutters, inlet diffusers, and laser-guided construction ensuring accurate and consistent distance.
That's on top of vast improvements in training, other equipment, doping (which has a very long history), professionalisation of sport (including the Olympics), and other factors.
Talent is a component, but the overall phenomenon is highly multidimensional.
Various types of doping could cause this too. More positively, tech, diet and science changes could too in some sports too.
Shouldn't the middle swimmer be worse off with "fast" pools? There would be less waves on the side lanes, compared to a "slow" pool where there are reflections.
> 2. The sides. Does the water spill over the sides into the gutters, or smash into a wall and bounce back, creating more chop.
My only experience with competitive swimming is playing some water polo some 25 years ago, but wouldn't that effect disproportionately affect the swimmers on the outermost lanes?
Edit: the article addresses this, so if anyone else is curious like I was, I suggest clicking.
Slightly deeper and there's drag from the floor as their arms barely miss it. That effect persists until it doesn't .. now it's deep enough.
It needs to be deep enough that vortex's created by swimmers have disapated by the time they reach bottom and reflect back to the surface so as to not interfere with following swimmers or swimmers returning.
Is it’s deep enough, the gravitational mass of the water will form a black hole and squash the swimmer to death.
Big whorls have little whorls
Which feed on their velocity,
And little whorls have lesser whorls
And so on to viscosity.
and then to an event horizon.
Here is a source from 2012 which shows pool depths weren't always uniform but it seems more modern pools are
https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/olympic-pools-whe...
This paper does a decent job of modelling how swimmers move through water: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/epdf/10.1098/rsif.201...
>But the “slow pool” theory does not hold up as well when one looks beyond the winning times. In fact, it appears a bit, ahem, shallow.
>When you consider the times it has taken to earn a spot in the finals in Paris — which is to say, the eighth-place times from either preliminary heats (in events 400 meters or longer) or semifinals — those times have been faster than in Fukuoka in 10 of the 12 events and faster than in Tokyo in five of 12. In the women’s 400 free, for example, it took a time of 4 minutes 3.83 seconds to make it into the final, faster than in Fukuoka (4:04.98) or Tokyo (4:04.07).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2024/07/30/pa...
Are France competition pools across the country just always that shallow? What are dimensions of the pools from the past 10-15 Olympics? Should this have been an established standard? (gonna say yes to that one)
Although the recommendation has been 3 meters for a while.
Worth noting that the WR was from a Chinese swimmer and there's a current controversy around whether or not a large contingent of swimmers from the Chinese team violated anti-doping rules after a banned substance was found in their test results several months prior.
Reports are self-policed because it would spread the IoC or other international bodies too thin (ahem... convenient), and the Chinese reporting body "Chinada" dismissed it after saying "trace amounts were found in the kitchen where the athletes were staying at a meet".
I attempted to track down the report to see if the 100m world record breaker was amongst those who tested positive, but wasn't able to find it posted online anywhere. So he may have NOT been incriminated there, or may have been, can't say either way.
I want to celebrate the increased emphasis on swimming internationally as a former college swimmer, but it's also hard to ignore some of the clouds of controversy that have formed surrounding Chinese athletes. I understand the Olympics are a focus point for the country, and again as a former D1 swimmer I can empathize with wanting to do well, but at the same time I hope they're not crossing any lines in effort to win, as that defeats the spirit of competition.
Also worth noting that Phelps and Alison Schmitt testified before Congress and spoke about the intrusive frequency and nature of how often they were drug tested.
The NYT/The Daily did some great reporting and follow-up podcast on the situation.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4Rcc852dmPSPytDdRCKInU?si=2...
Marchand beat the rest by more than 5 seconds in the end but basically "gave up" after 300 meters. Shoulda coulda woulda but he didn't need to push himself at all for the gold (his last split was the 2nd worst against everyone else).
More generally, and talking about being good, it’s noticeable how the US, the biggest force in swimming, is going through a change of generations, as their only remaining star is Ledecky, who’s on her fourth Olympics. The Russians are also missing, they always used to have one or two super-stars ready to push the Americans to the limit (think Popov and Pankratov). The Aussies are doing a very fine job, and fair-play to them for that, but they’re also kind of not up to the highest levels in the men’s competition.
If I recall correctly: - Javeline would go further (less air resistance) - High cardio events would go slower (less oxygen for athletes)
That would have been a "slow pool" factor all things being equal!
We traveled to Colorado for an invitational.
I was so slow and so tired. 18 year old me didn't realize that air changes. Idiot.
I also realized that if those guys ever came to the Midwest, they would absolutely dominate.
I live at 5000 ft now, but in my 30s I lived and slept at 9000 but did all my rides near 5000. That was an amazing time for my fitness. I could go hard at “low” altitude but recover at high which is what my body adapted for.
If you want to regulate what they wear for the competition itself, fine. But I don't see how regulating what they wear while training is different than regulating what exercises they do while training, what their diet is while training, etc.
I was talking about competing. I don't care how they train. The purpose of competing in the event is to win, and in those circumstances, gear should be normalized as much as possible. There are always going to be differences in size, strength, etc. The purpose of the competition is to find the best in the world, and gear prevents at the competition that if some teams have items that give them a huge advantage over others.
See this bit on the Velodrome in London: https://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/making-tracks-building-th...
You can see in the timelapse video here[1] the pool being built above the surface. They built it to a depth of 2.15m, the minimum required is 2m, but the recommended depth is 3m.
I can only assume that making it deeper would have cost more, and perhaps reduced the sightlines from the stands as the pool would have been higher in the arena?
[1] https://www.thesun.co.uk/sport/29555045/paris-2024-olympics-...
la defense arena has a capacity of 40000.
Paris Aquatic Centre -- Aquatics (water polo preliminaries, diving, artistic swimming)
Why not have those events at a different temporary facility? Feels like they did not avoid building a white elephant...
>Last Thursday, President Emmanuel Macron inaugurated the Olympic Aquatic Centre, but behind the flashes and smiles of the opening ceremony was a complex story that saw the budget increase by more than €115 million and the number of events reduced.
> From swimming lessons to recreational use and high-level competitions, the Aquatics Centre will be multifunctional. From July 2025, the Aquatics Centre will become a vast multi-sports facility open to all, including two pools (50m and 25m), a fitness area, bouldering area, paddle tennis section and pitches for team sports. It will also have an adjustable floor to serve a variety of purposes (swimming lessons for babies and children, etc.). The Aquatics Centre will also be the state-of-the-art facility that the French swimming community has been looking forward to for decades. The French Swimming Federation will be able to host national and international competitions in its four indoor disciplines. The Centre will also provide a best-in-class federal training facility for leading French athletes and will notably be home to the country’s diving centre
>This capacity, which may be overlooked by many, is not for World Aquatics, which requires a minimum of 15,000 for top-level swimming events, so France will not be able to host a World Championships
Which got me wondering if there’s any detectable correlation on record setting and what lane you’re in (closer to the side of the pool might be slower?)
But unable to locate it. Fairly certain it was Barcelona.
Now, I could make up reasons for this, like not every athlete is strictly "from" the place they compete for, but a just-so story isn't needed here, prepositions are what they are, often arbitrary but always specific.
Citation:
https://apnews.com/article/paris-olympics-china-swimming-pan...
This is a line of thought that leads to the consideration that sports as are whole are rationally meaningless. That leads to hobbies being meaningless. That leads to emotions and ethics being meaningless.
You can't apply rationality to explain why people care about things. But people do care about it, so it matters.
I completely understand why you might not want a slow pool in a competition like this, but the emphasis on it being "not ideal for record setting" is weird to me. I guess I just don't understand the constant quest to set better and better records. Do we really always need to be hitting new world records? What's the point of that, why does that need to be a thing? If records like that are expected to be broken at every Olympics, what's the point of striving to break them if they're just going to be broken again?
Meh, I'll go back to yelling at clouds, I guess.
It ain't special if it happens a lot, I guess is my thinking.
The point is that many athletes are only at their peak for one or two Olympics. How rubbish for them that they're not able to get a fair shot at the record like others have had in the past.
With that in mind though, what is the point of a world event like this if, given the time and resources, we're not going to try and optimize for peak performance for the participants given that for many of them it's the career peak?
I'd argue plenty of blame to go around though: for one, why is there not a standard pool design and dimension?
/shrug
Money. All else being equal, setting a new world record will lead to you earning more money, compared to 'just' winning gold. Both because there many cases are cash bonuses tied to world records, and from a sponsorship point of view it is easier to 'sell' a world record holder. Most people know that Usain Bolt holds the 100m world record and Olympic record, you have to be pretty into sprinting to know who won gold at the 100m last Olympics.
Good thing there's credible explanations about the differences in pools and how that effects swimming speed. Otherwise, I'd assume that no one wanted to "'fess up" to prior doping.
But you're right, they don't affect medals.
This type of focus leads to unhealthy expectations and doping in my opinion.
Something causing these elite athletes to be a bit off their game? Whatever could it possibly be…
- https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/olympics/2024/07/31/us...
- https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/uk-news/team-gb-swimmer-m...
- https://www.theguardian.com/sport/article/2024/jul/30/paris-...
- https://svenska.yle.fi/a/7-10061397
Yup, no idea. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Given lack of testing and that many countries (including European countries) are seeing Covid surges right now, I think it's highly likely that most competitors are competing with either current or recent Covid infections affecting their peak performance capacity.
Edit: I wouldn't suggest it's the sole cause of performance issues. But for an entire article on the topic of swim performance to completely ignore multiple reports of viral infection from top performers seems a glaring omission.
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1: "The 29-year-old does not have to isolate from other athletes and does not have to test negative before competing again": https://www.espn.com/olympics/story/_/id/40672610/olympics-2...
2: "For now, nothing has been put into place by the organizing committee … but hand sanitizer is available in its clinics and restaurants.": https://www.cbsnews.com/news/2024-paris-olympics-covid-cases...
Google is your friend; this [1] is but one France-specific example of coverage. You can find many similar articles in jurisdictions across Western Europe raising concern specifically in the last month or two.
Edit:
Many jurisdictions stopped collecting and/or sharing robust datasets in 2023 (KFF even calls attention to this). This often means digging through opaque reports to get useful data.
Here's an example [2] from the UK government, in PDF format, but bottom of Page 10 looks pretty "surge-y" to me over the last couple months and not yet at peak.
Edit:
Another example of good data horrible to access. Scotland wastewater monitoring [3] I can't provide a direct link; have to click on "Respiratory pathogens" and the first chart is wastewater monitoring; July 2024 shows the highest "surge" in levels since 2022.
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[1] https://www.connexionfrance.com/news/covid-19-advice-for-tes...
[2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/66337699cf3b5...
[1]: https://swimswam.com/swimmers-pieroni-and-gatt-join-the-covi...
https://www.ted.com/talks/david_epstein_are_athletes_really_...
As with any tech talk, think critically. Athletes train more vigorously, and have much better nutrition. Earlier athletes in the Olympics and Tour de France drank alcohol and smoked during performance.
It's still helpful to pay attention to the venues, like the swimming pools, tracks , wrestling mats etc. My verdict is that venue plays a big part, and records are not comparable from different venues.
https://slate.com/technology/2024/07/paris-olympics-2024-bre...
But maybe they wanted not to be too many world records be broken, to damage control the apparent doping problem.
You can easily see on TV now, who is doped and who's not. All the dopers do have dark purple faces after the swim, usually the middle swimmers from the US, GB, AUS, Ireland, F, China, whilst the non-dopers keep their usual skin color. Italy, Hungary, Germany, ... Some hormone effect probably with these rushes.
Right.