The elite swimming world is full of amazing old(er) sprinters. This Olympic cycle, the best candidate to make us all feel lazy is Therese Alshammar. The 38 year old mother has a good chance to make her sixth consecutive Swedish team. If she does so, her performance will not be unprecedented.
After all, the swimming public has seen a 41-year old Dara Torres medal at an Olympic games. Last time around it was another Swede, Lars Frolander, making his 6th team at 38. What’s more striking than these examples is a curious trend. All of the swimmers still performing at a high level past 35 are swimming sprint events.
We take this at face value. However, the sport of track and field is rife with elite distance performers at this age. In 2008, Constantina Dita won gold in the Olympic marathon at age 38. Meb Keflezighi won a Boston Marathon at the same age. The current world record holder in the Men’s marathon set that record at age 30. Paula Radcliffe was nearly that age when she set the women’s record twelve years ago.
In swimming, there are virtually no elite distance swimmers, especially in women’s swimming, close to these ages. If Katie Ledecky does as expected and wins the women’s 800 in Rio, it will keep a streak alive. The event has never been won by a woman over the age of 22 years old.
Men’s distance swimming hasn’t faired much better. Sure, Grant Hackett is making a comeback at 35, but it seems quite unlikely that the best distance swimmer of the last 25 years will medal in any distance race. The men’s 1500 has never been won by a man over 30. Hackett’s best medal chance is to repeat his solid 4×200 relay performance from Kazan.
On the women’s side, there are a few potential medalists in their mid-to-late 20s (Lotte Friis, Jazmin Carlin and Lauren Boyle). However impressive they are, they sit well behind the teenage Ledecky in the current rankings.
So what gives? Does it make physiological sense that only sprint speed can be maintained past 30 years of age? Shouldn’t sprinting, with it’s demand for power, be more effected as swimmers move past their physical prime?
These are questions worth asking, especially in a time when the sport continues to get older and older. One theory is quite boring: that this is simply “the way it is” and that distance is a young swimmer’s game.
The flip side of that argument is that perhaps the way in which we train distance swimming is based on young swimmers and what works best for them. Huge strides have been made in sprint training over the last fourty years, such that the improvement curve for the shortest races has been much better than longest races. Could it be that there is an opportunity for someone out there to better understand the needs of aging distance athletes?
Perhaps Ledecky could be the one to change it all. We already know she’s a generational talent, but only time will tell if she has a more enduring career than Janet Evans, for instance. If so, we have a long time to wait.
One difference between swimming and running is that most runners don’t start seriously training for distance until much later in their careers. For example, even though they might log quite a bit of mileage, most is at much much slower paces, as runners are likely to train for events like the 3k, 5k, and 10k through college and their mid-20s, where they focus on shorter periods of pace and tempo training.
There is a commonly held believe in running that you only have a finite period where your body can handle the wear and tear of marathon training, so it’s best not to burn yourself out too early with true distance training.
An article that I found interesting… Read more »
This is an interesting article. I had read it but forgotten about it thanks. It’s very true. one of the big debates in the running community is parents allowing children to compete in half marathons or marathons and beyond at ages as young as 8 and older. The argument against is that they are still growing and developing…their parents argue that they are enthusiastic about it now, so why not…
Swimming, even without pavement pounding definitely has it’s share of sport specific injuries- shoulders,arms, etc. Typical meet events for age group kids do not include anything that I would consider equivalent to a half marathon or marathon in running….
I think this stems from swimming as a whole being very young. How many swimmers older than 30 have won an Olympic gold medal in ANY event?
I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Lochte was 28 in 2012, Phelps was 27. Consider two of swimming’s great comeback stories: Vlad Salnikov and Pablo Morales. Both were still 28 years old. The closest I can think of is Gary Hall Jr, who was 29 years and 11 months old for his triumph in the 50 free. Thus it doesn’t make sense to single out the men’s 1500: as far as I remember, no man over 30 has won Olympic gold in ANY event. This says swimming… Read more »
I gave you one right in the article. Dara Torres won silver in 2008 in the 50 freestyle at 41 years old. I guess a lot of people don’t think of her because she is such an outlier, and 2008 was certainly an outlier of a year.
But Marleen Veldhuis also medaled in the 50 in 2012, she got bronze and was 33 years old.
Inge De Bruijn was 31 when she won gold in the 50 in 2004, and also won silver in the 100. So there’s a pretty good track record on the women’s side especially in the 50.
Also, Salnikov doesn’t come close to disproving this article. I know the narrative is that he was such a warrior and champion fighting for one more gold after missing out on a “true” field in 1980 and 1984. But the fact of the matter was that the 1500 in 1988 was abnormally slow. Salnikov swam in perhaps the worst era of men’s distance swimming. His winning time in 1988 was only two seconds faster than Brian Goodell went in 1976!
For comparison’s sake, the 400 freestyle winning time moved five seconds over the same time period. To top it off, Perkins swam 17 seconds faster to win in Barcelona.
I think Mcgillrocks was referring exclusively to gold medalists. Perhaps too narrow a sample.
I think that’s a little unfair to Salnikov! Goodell, of course, is something of a distance legend, maybe the best American distance swimmer ever. For instance Gooddell sliced 8 seconds off of the world record in 1976. Salnikov dropped eight MORE seconds from the record and brought it all the way down to 14:54.
Furthermore, despite being 28, Salnikov swam faster than anyone other than he had ever gone with his 15:00 performance in 1988. It was hardly in my opinion a mediocre swim against a lackluster performance, but in fact a swim that would have been a new WR if he had not already set the bar so high.
It is true that from 1976 to 1988… Read more »
One factor that hasn’t come up: Relays!
For really good countries, if you can qualify for a relay, you’re in the running for a medal.
Consider Amanda Weir. She’s 29, and maybe top-50 in the world for 100 free. That’s puts her in the running for USA’s relay spot, and a medal or two.
Same idea with Natalie Coughlin, or Jason Lezak, or Melanie Schlanger, or Fred Bousquet.
Consider Kate Ziegler. She’s 27, and maybe top-50 in the world for 400 free. She has little chance of qualifying individually… her best hope is to make it onto the 4×200 fr.
Fewer medals are given out for distance events. Ergo, less motivation to stay in the sport.
The USMS confirms this is a physiological determinant. If you look at results in Master’s swimmers over the age of 45, there are some seriously fast sprinters, but the 200’s don’t hold up nearly as well.
Male strength usually peaks around age 35, so it is not uncommon to see most of the World’s Strongest Man contestant in their mid to late 30s.
So, would this extrapolate to Phelps? I think not because Phelps is really a swimmer with a distance base. He still has a NAG in the 500 free. Phelps has been able to win the 100 Fly with his closing speed, but he is usually around 7th at the 50 and as he gets older his… Read more »
I’m not so sure about the not hitting the same times part, the evidence looks the other way. I agree that it will be tough, Rio medals are indeed no look for him, but he should make the Olympic team no problem.
Actually, I think there’s reason to believe Phelps’ 100 fly will be at or near its peak in Rio (adjusting for suit times, anyway). He’s at the age where he still has the endurance to finish strong, but he’s starting to get “old man strength,” which will help his front half.
I know that’s an anecdotal term, but there has been at least one study showing that young men and older men can make similar strength gains on the same workout regimen despite the method of strength increase being totally different. The muscles in a young man become stronger by increasing the size of the muscle fibers, as expected. On the flip side, the muscles in the older man will… Read more »
Also, I’m sure he is training hard, as you say, but I haven’t seen any indication that he’s confused about his times. He’s training hard and racing fairly tired. That’s how Bob has always trained him, and I think he trusts the results they’ve always gotten. He’s embraced the grind.
I think it’s more mental than a physiological thing. Others have mentioned the prevalence of 30+ year old athletes in other endurance sports, so I won’t go into that. There’s just something about long, hard pool training that isn’t as repeatable with age as running outside or swimming in open water. If Grant Hackett hadn’t taken so much time off and had stayed in shape, there’s a good chance he’d still be one of the top distance swimmers in the world. If he continues to swim after Rio, I think he’d be able to get back into his old distance form. That’s all just my opinion, though, I suppose swimming could be unique among endurance sports, I just haven’t read… Read more »
The article does not note that, conversely, there are not many sprinters past their 30s in track & field. Plus, in track&field you see athletes converting to longer distances late in their career, which never ever happens in swimming (if anything, swimmers focus on the shorter end of their range of events). I think there are physiological factors at work here.
Training distance is a tough life and it’s hard to keep up the grind. I like many matured late and was swimming the 1500/800/400/400IM early in my career but as I matured I was a mid D flyer and IM.
Training to that volume takes its toll on you physically as well as mentally because you can not substitute volume. The shear amount of repeats and vicious workouts you have to do at that level make it difficult to sustain over the long term. Another factor is ncaa points, unless you can swim down to the 500 and have enough strokes to pick up the 400 IM your value is limited (i.e. Scholarship value). So you end up with… Read more »
Seriously, who wants to “keep going to the well” for that long? For training and races, there is a physical reminder every time of how much a 400-800-1500 (or 500-1000-1650) or more is going to hurt. I was a distance swimmer in college, and still swim distance at the Masters and regional open-water level. I find it emotionally, mentally, and physically hard to get myself to be anything less that almost fearful of how much a race is going to hurt in the hours and minutes prior. It’s a memory of “The Iron Cross” every weekend (sometimes twice per weekend) during dual meet season, as well as the 500 twice in a day, the 200 three times (800 relay included),… Read more »
Also, at the international level, for at least FINA and Olympics, not to mention Trials, the 800m and 1500m are prelims-finals. While there are some who can take the edge off the prelims swim and make it into finals, there are only 8 finalists. It almost bit Kieran Perkins in the backside in 1996 in Atlanta: he qualified 8th and defended his Olympic title out of lane 8. The swimmers slower than the 4th seed have to go all out just to make it into finals: there are no tactics other than that, and no second swim if they’re 9th. Then the second swim for the 3 medals (or the two international meet spots) are also red-lined.
In OWS,… Read more »
BaldingEagle – just a quick clarification on the point of Olympic qualifying. The women, because they qualified only 1 through Worlds, don’t get a crack at a second spot via the open water qualifier. The only way to send 2 swimmers to the Olympics in an OW race is to have BOTH finish in the top 10 at Worlds. So, for the US, women’s qualifying is done too.
Thanks for the clarification. I was even on the FINA site getting the info. I overlooked that part. Team USA has three Olympians already decided: Jordan Wilimovsky (World Champion), Sean Ryan (4th at WC), and Haley Anderson.