Does 50 Freestyle History Spell Doom for Cielo at Olympics?

In my neverending attempt to perfect extrapolative swimming prediction, I’ve begun to dig through some historical results to see if I can find any trends that are worth knowing ahead of the official, final, and obligatory 2012 Olympic picks that will be done later this year.

The first trend is one that is scary if you happen to be Cesar Cielo. Since the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, no swimmer has come into an Olympic Games as a World Champion in the 50 free and emerged as the Olympic Champion. That’s 0-for-3.

In fact, only one swimmer has ever followed a World Championship with Olympic gold, and that is the Russian Rocket Alexander Popov in 1996.

This in-and-of itself is not all that condemning of a fact, as the 50 free is typically such an unpredictable and closely-packed event.

Here’s what’s even scarier. In those same three Olympic Games (2000, 2004, and 2008), not a single MEDALIST from the previous World Championship has MEDALED in the Olympics. That’s right – 0-for-9. And further, out of those 9 Olympic medalists, only two (Cielo for gold in 2008, van den Hoogenband for bronze in 2000) were even FINALISTS at the previous World Championships.

These numbers spell good news for someone like Nathan Adrian, who missed the podium in Shanghai. Or heck, even someone like Jimmy Feigen or Anthony Ervin, who weren’t in the picture in 2011; or maybe a young swimmer like Ukrainian Andriy Govorov or Gideo Louw of South Africa.

With the way Cielo is swimming fast, over and over again, it’s becoming harder to not pick him as the gold medalist in the 50 for this coming year. Especially with the roll he’s on (he’s won the last two World Championships and the 2008 Olympic Title). If I were picking right now, I’d still take him, but the trend is there; and Cielo is seemingly never more than a bad start away from imploding.

Interestingly, the trend is much more positive the other way around. Medalists and winners of the 50 free at the Olympics have fared extremely well at the next edition of Worlds.

Here’s the moral of the story. This certainly isn’t a big enough sample to say for a fact that Cielo won’t medal. But whoever you’re considering for the medal positions at the Olympics in your picks for the men’s 50 free, don’t be intimidated to go outside of the box.