Nevertheless, we're huge fans of watching swimming from a safe distance, and an Olympic pool never fails to produce plenty of enjoyable action and memorable moments. But there's a problem, and we think it's become a pretty big one. The sheer number of similar swimming events makes it far easier for a world-beating swimmer to collect multiple Olympic medals than a world-beating athlete in any other sport.
To illustrate our point, we've cropped together the below table from London 2012 website data to show the most successful athletes at the Games listed by the number of medals they won.
As you can see, 29 athletes across all Olympic sports won three or more medals and almost two-thirds of these (19) were swimmers. With a personal haul of four, Russian gymnast Alina Mustafina was the only non-swimmer to win more than three medals. The five most successful athletes at the Games were all swimmers and won 26 medals between them, 14 of which were gold. This is not simply a case of one or two swimmers compiling legendary careers and sweeping all before them - there are dozens of multiple medallists in swimming. We couldn't find equivalent data for previous Games, but this certainly isn't a new phenomenon.
We aren't claiming that it's easy to win swimming medals. Nor are we trying to undermine the achievements of Phelps, Lochte, Franklin and Spitz. Those athletes are great Olympians and swimming is a very competitive and gruelling sport. However, it's important to put their medal collections into context, and we can safely say that any of those athletes would have won far fewer medals had they been equally dominant in any other sport.
To some extent, that's a situation which can't be changed - some sports such as sailing or rowing simply don't afford scope for any athlete to compete for more than one medal at each Olympics. And even if those sports are disregarded, swimming's governing bodies would maintain that there is no problem to fix, on the basis that their champions garner greater coverage, become bigger legends and give the sport a higher profile by breaking prominent records. We disagree for the same reason. The disproportionate bias in swimming's favour is not fair to athletes in other sports.
One option for redressing the balance would be to cut events from the swimming programme. This approach has been taken with other sports - we've mentioned before that the most prestigious events in track cycling have been cut from the Olympics. Swimming would argue that they already have fewer events at the Olympics than at their world championships, with (for example) 50m races in breaststroke, backstroke and butterfly being omitted - though again the same is true for other sports. For different reasons, we agree that cutting events would not be the best approach. Swimming is arguably the second most important Olympic sport behind athletics, both in terms of participation and revenue. Reducing its role might open the door for another modern sport to infiltrate the Games (such as the painfully incongruous BMX), and would represent a move away from the traditional ideals of the Olympics. And, dropping the analysis ball for a second, we enjoy watching it all far too much to start picking favourites. So there.
A better alternative might be to restrict the number of events in which any one swimmer can participate. This could be configured in several different ways - for example, a swimmer could be limited to any five events, or to four individual events and one relay. We think this would place swimming on an equal footing with other Olympic sports. As things stand, an exceptional athlete could only realistically win four medals on the track at one Olympics, but Michael Phelps has shown that an exceptional swimmer can win up to eight medals in the pool. Most multiple swimming medallists will have competed in two or perhaps even three relays where their contribution to a team's success is often minimal, so there's certainly a case for trying to skew participation towards individual events as part of the exercise.
Is any such change likely to happen? Well, no. Not even slightly. American sponsors control the purse strings of the IOC, and American swimmers rule the pool - four of those top five London 2012 athletes mentioned above are American swimmers. Either of the above options would seriously jeopardise America's position at the top of the medal table. So perhaps it's more accurate to say that we're probably stuck with the status quo until either (a) other countries become better than America at swimming, or (b) companies from other countries contribute more to funding the Olympics. Despite these obstacles, we very much hope that athletes from other sports will be able to compete on a level playing field with their wetter teammates sooner rather than later.
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