State of the Swimming World 2010

With the Commonwealth games done, its time to wrap up 2010's Long Course swimming season in a bow and make hasty, purely subjective judgments on everything that happened. I'm going to pay particular attention the hometown team (USA), but its impossible to discuss where we are without considering the rest of the world. First, I'll discuss the overall state of team USA and then jump around with random quick hit thoughts in true attention deficit style.

When analyzing team USA, I always want to first look at medal trends. As I said earlier in this summer, there was no one meet where all the world's best swimmers clashed, but I am going to pretend there was one anyway. Thankfully, Swimming World Magazine did the legwork for me and compiled the results of the "Virtual World Championships". After reviewing those results, here is the four year medal trend for team USA (Results from 50s of stroke have been excepted since they are not currently Olympic events):

2007 (Worlds): 18 Gold, 11 Silver, 2 Bronze

2008 (Olympics) 12 Gold, 9 Silver, 10 Bronze

2009: (Worlds): 10 Gold, 5 Silver, 5 Bronze

2010 (Virtual Worlds): 14 Gold, 13 Silver, 5 Bronze

Looking at those results, it's pretty startling how resurgent Team USA was in 2010. Australian and British backers may cry foul over the fact that many of their best swimmers were laid low by "Delhi Belly" at the most recent Commonwealth Games. Still, we only have the tangible results to go by, and with those Team USA looks very strong.

To what should we attribute the resurgence? Well, one of the biggest changes in USA Swimming's structure over these past two years was the introduction of Post-Grad Training Centers. A significant amount of USA Swimming dollars went into the centers. However, the tangible impact of these centers is minimal: only two female medalists (Kate Ziegler, Allison Schmitt), and two male medalists (Tyler Clary, Michael Phelps) came from these centers, with Schmitt and Clary having both trained the majority of the year with their college programs. Thats a fairly small piece of the pie considering the money and talent invested.

No 2010's resurgence came almost entirely from the systems of producing fast athletes that we had prior to 2008. Dave Salo at USC/Trojan coached the most outstanding women's swimmer in the world in 2010, Rebecca Soni. The best men's swimmer (Ryan Lochte) in the world came from UF/Gators. Mission Viejo Nadadores and Germantown Aquatic Club had medalists.

Now finally, to the ritalin-free finish

-If there had been odds on who would have the world's fastest 200 IM in 2010, I think they would have been something like this:

Steph Rice 2-1

Ariana Kukors 5-2

Katinka Hozzu 4-1

Alicia Coutts 100-1

Seriously, I didn't even think Coutts was in the top 2 on her own team behind Rice and Seebohm but that's why they swim the meets

-I couldn't find a year in Swimnews' archived world rankings (dating back to 1990) that there wasn't a male American breaststroker ranked in the world's top 5. This year Mark Gangloff ranked highest at 8th.

-Despite my deep desire to dislike him for being Canadian, I love Brent Hayden not only for swimming fast but for rocking the bald head at all the biggest meets