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Comment by jjulius | Hacker News Reader

This is entirely just my own opinion...

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.

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Setting a new world record is part of making history, and many are not broken at every Olympics. Consider this example - the men's 100m sprint world record was last broken by Usain Bolt 15 years ago! Now if you're not into that particular sport then maybe that doesn't mean much to you, fair enough. But wow, when someone comes along who is able to break that record it will really be something special.

Yeah, that's kinda what I was getting at. The way this talks about "impeding world records" makes it sound like they're expected to be broken frequently. If that's the case, to me, it kinda cheapens world records - that's to say, if they're broken so often, it doesn't seem as big of a deal. But when someone like Usain sets a record that lasts for a while, it does make sense to me that the breaking of that record is special.

It ain't special if it happens a lot, I guess is my thinking.

Sure, but I think you're missing the point.

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.

I think it might be a motivation for competitors when they are already at the top, it is a way they can compare their performance with all past (and future) performances, and most importantly, with their own performance in other competitions.

The Olympic committee mandates that new facilities get built for every Olympics, which is partly why the games are so damn expensive everytime.

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?

I guess, at least to me, there's a bit of a difference between "optimizing for peak performance in order to best your opponent(s)" and "expecting to break world records".

/shrug

I guess I just don't understand the constant quest to set better and better records.

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.

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