I just watched the NYT animation of the men’s 1500m freestyle and realized that, after turns, Bobby Fink largely gets out ahead of other swimmers because of how much speed he gets when he pushes off the wall, and then other swimmers start to catch up. It made me realize that if the competition were 1500m in a straight line, the results would be different.
Are there measures in place around how much time you actually have to “swim,” or is this just how swimming in a pool works?
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A 1500m straight line pool would be completely impractical to build. So we have 50m pools and that’s how the competitions are. The turns and pullouts are definitely a huge part of completion though. In fact in younger competitive swimming in the USA you compete in a 25 yard pool from September to April and then switch to a 50m pool for May to August. And some kids post better relative times in the 25Y vs 50M pools because they’re great at turns vs the straight line swimming. Yes 200Y vs 200M is also a different total length of swimming but there are separate time standards for SCY (short course yards) vs LCM (long course meter) events.
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