Early Olympic Relay Look: Men’s 4×100 Medley Relay

As the dust settles on U.S., Australian, Canadian, and French Olympic Trials, we’re taking a bird’s-eye view of how the relay battles are shaping up.

Olympic-Qualified Relays

The top 12 relays at 2019 World Championships earned Olympic berths for their nations. Four more nations earned berths by putting up the fastest times among unqualified nations over a 15-month period leading up to the Olympics.

Aggregate times below are based on season-bests from September 2020 through June 2021. Lifetime-bests or time drops can obviously change the picture significantly. We’ll do a more in-depth preview of each relay event in the coming weeks, but this first-look projection is aimed at specifically seeing the impacts of recent Olympic Trials meets on the Olympic relay picture.

The Favorites

Breaststroke has long been the weak point for the American men. But Michael Andrew‘s explosive Trials meet could realistically give the U.S. the second-best breaststroker of all the major contenders. Sandwiched between the world record-holders in back (Ryan Murphy) and fly (Caeleb Dressel), Andrew should be set up with clean water and a lead over the unstoppable Brit we’ll get to further down.

Dressel is the top U.S. man in fly and free. We published a much longer examination of the top U.S. relay options, but this foursome seems like the most logical choice for Team USA. If you want to really dive into the weeds, follow that link for all of the major lineup options.

The U.S. has never lost this race at the Olympics – that includes 9 straight Olympic golds stretching back to the boycotted 1980 Olympics, with five consecutive golds prior to that.

The Contenders

Great Britain looked like the best candidates to end that U.S. streak, knocking off the U.S. for World Champs gold in 2019. Adam Peaty is likely to outsplit all other breaststrokers in the field by one to two full seconds. But even with that huge deficit, it took an absurd 46.1 anchor split from Scott to run down the U.S. in 2019. That’s because the U.S. breaststroke woes have often been matched by the British backstroke woes.

Still, the Brits are loaded at the other three legs, and Greenbank is a rising swimmer with upside.

Russia got bit by the Peaty deficit at Euros, leading by 1.5 seconds after backstroke and somehow trailing by two-tenths after breaststroke. They’ve got lots of lineup options, including using Evgeny Rylov on back and Kolesnikov on free, or swapping out Chupkov for the sprintier Kirill Prigoda on breaststroke.

Russia should also swap in Minakov on fly after using Mikhail Vekovishchev there at Euros, and that might be enough to narrow the one-second gap between them and Great Britain at Euros.

Italy was only four-tenths behind Russia at Euros. They’ve got one of the field’s best breaststrokers (Martinenghi was just a half-second slower than Peaty at Euros), and Miressi is an impact anchor. The young Ceccon might be able to carry this team into contention if he can stick with the Murphys and Kolesnikovs of the world on the opening leg.

One more team to note. Australia appears to have a substantial breaststroke hole that might sink the whole ship. But if they can close that margin a little, they’ve got two really big-time legs on the end, including Chalmers, who split 46.6 anchoring this relay at 2019 Worlds.

The Field

Host nation Japan should be faster than this aggregate time on breaststroke, a traditional strength. (Yasuhiro Koseki split 58.1 back in 2019).

China has the makings of a dominant front half. Xu Jiayu is as good as any backstroker in the field, and we’ve seen Yan Zibei split 58-low before. It really comes down to the back half.