Has anything in the drug testing changed that can affect swimmers?
Russian imports/exports are much more restricted now than 4 years ago.
Did previously a lot of doping come russia? I am curious.
Is a 'slow' swimming pool impeding world records?
161–170 of 344 posts
Re: Is a 'slow' swimming pool impeding world records?
#162I was a college swimmer, qualified for Olympic Trials in 2012 and 2016. There are absolutely slow and fast pools. It basically comes down to two things: 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 struggli…
Why doesn't it affect more the people closer to the sides?
It does. This is why the fastest qualifiers get to swim in the middle lanes.
Re: Is a 'slow' swimming pool impeding world records?
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
But a lot of the swimmers themselves are not able to go anywhere near their personal bests: this is a sharp reversal from past Olympics, where many athletes reached new personal records. 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…
Maybe they all change their behavior because they know the pool is less deep as they are used to. Some kind of placebo effect or fear of coming to close to the ground. Many athletes are superstitious.
Considering touching the bottom results in disqualification it isn't a superstitious fear.
Re: Is a 'slow' swimming pool impeding world records?
#164I was a college swimmer, qualified for Olympic Trials in 2012 and 2016. There are absolutely slow and fast pools. It basically comes down to two things: 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 struggli…
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Re: Is a 'slow' swimming pool impeding world records?
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, in the same way that all Marathon records are set in only a few marathons which have very favorable conditions.
It's hard to control conditions for a Marathon, but what's to stop some future Olympic host from intentionally creating the fastest pool possible that wouldn't be objected to, just so they could watch "their" Olympics break all the records?
That is exactly what happens almost every time... Just not this time
Re: Is a 'slow' swimming pool impeding world records?
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Not sure if you are being satirical, but yes that's the point. The entire point of qualifiers in most sports is to reward better participants - otherwise they would have incentive to sandbag their performance or perform other shenanigans for preferential matchups.
You get rewarded by qualifying. If you perform better in the heat that doesn't mean you should get an advantage in the race. Random allocation would be better.
Re: Is a 'slow' swimming pool impeding world records?
#167Re: Is a 'slow' swimming pool impeding world records?
#168What I remember from the London Olympics is that records don’t fall from the sky, but venues can be planned/ optimised for them. Maybe this did not happen in Paris so much? See this bit on the Velodrome in London: https://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/making-tracks-building-th...
In Paris they didn't want to build a white elephant swimming venue that will never get filled outside of the Olympics. So instead they converted an indoor stadium, the Paris La Défense Arena that is normally used for rugby and concerts. 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 ca…
And similarly for Los Angeles, the current proposal is to have swimming events at SoFi, a ~70,000 seat NFL stadium.
Re: Is a 'slow' swimming pool impeding world records?
#169This 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.
Re: Is a 'slow' swimming pool impeding world records?
#170I was a college swimmer, qualified for Olympic Trials in 2012 and 2016. There are absolutely slow and fast pools. It basically comes down to two things: 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 struggli…
My untrained eye has noticed. But I also think it's not really a big deal. There are so few events where the conditions are exactly the same every 4 years. Just kinda the luck of the draw if you happen to be competing in the most ideal conditions for WR setting in any event
Also, the important bit is fairness for all competitors. As the OP said, the same conditions affect everybody. I have little sympathy for the (few) swimmers complaining. They are not owed a world record and if they’re that good, they’re going to get one anyway.