Why does swimming have some many more events at the Olympics than other sports?

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It seems disproportionate to other sport, except maybe gymnastics. Some popular sports don’t even have any representation, like cricket or bowling or squash. How did swimming get so much representation?

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18 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

are you not aware of track and field?

Anonymous 0 Comments

On top of swimming, there are also running, jumping, diving, skiing, snowboarding, sledding, and skating. Possibly rowing and cycling too but I’m not sure. Anything that is a form of getting from a to b seems to have many forms of Olympic competition, as there are a variety of ways to do the thing

Anonymous 0 Comments

There are a lot of variants of swimming and track and field. Different distances, styles, relays…. They’re ancient sports and have been a part of the modern Olympics since the beginning.

A lot of other sports don’t have many variations. There’s only one way to play soccer, and tennis only comes in singles and doubles.

Boxing and weightlifting don’t have many variations but they do have multiple weight classes.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s primarily the insistence on copying every “freestyle” (that is, *actually* swim as fast as you can) event 3 times for the slower strokes.

To be fair, other Olympic events have variants that impose arbitrary constraints. You can run, but you can also run with stuff in the way (hurdles) or while wiggling your hips (racewalking), or while occasionally getting your shoes wet (steeplechase). However, those constrained events tend not to copy every event from normal racing. There isn’t a 100 meter racewalk or a 10k hurdles.

There also appears to be, and I’m not a sports scientist here and so can’t offer a proper explanation as to why, enough overlap in who is good at the four strokes and how you train for them that a very good swimmer is capable of competing in all four. By contrast, there is very little overlap between ordinary running and hurdles and essentially none with racewalking, so even though the events are mechanically similar, it’s a different cast of characters in each event.

Lastly, it’s possible that you’re coming at this from a US perspective. The US has long has a dominant swimming program, so local coverage often focuses on those races, including all the heats and variations. It gives lots of opportunities for Americans to see their country(wo)men win. It could well be that if you were from Jamaica you’d be complaining about all the sprinting.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s just the nature of the way the sport has evolved.

To start with, swimming is a racing sport, and as with most racing sports, this means that there will be different events for different lengths, allowing people to specialize in short vs. medium vs. long distances. In this regard, swimming is almost identical to track running events.

What gives swimming so many events compared to running, however, is the fact that there are essentially four different ways to swim: Freestyle, Backstroke, Breaststroke, and Butterfly. Because a swimmer can specialize in one (or all) of these, there are separate events for each, as well as an event called medley that combines all four.

By comparison, there arent four different ways to “run”, so swimming naturally ends up including more events.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Number of medals awarded =/= amount of representation. It’s just a quirk of how individual race sports function, in comparison to how team sports with long game times like cricket function.

It’s up to the individual governing bodies of each sport to determine how they format themselves. If a football match could be over in 25 seconds, they’d probably have more space to have more medals. But it doesn’t go that quick.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Skiing has Alpine events (downhill, slalom, giant slalom, and super G), cross-county (with 10km, 15km, 30 km, and 50 km individual events plus individual and team sprints and a 4 x 10km team relay), Nordic combined events (first a jump, then a cross-country race), freestyle events (moguls, ariels, ski-cross, half-pipe, et al), bi-athalon, ski-jumping, and more if you include snowboards as part of this category.

Unless your name is Michael Phelps, it is unlikely that you would compete in anything other than your stroke discipline at different distances (e.g. just butterfly events, just backstroke events, or just freestyle at perhaps two different distances) plus your stroke in a relay or as part of a freestyle relay team.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I would say that this is less to do with the sport of swimming, and more to do with the history of the Olympics. We think of the games as a festival of many sports, but in reality there have always been a small number of flagship sports.

The big three are athletics, swimming, and gymnastics. In the modern era you might add track cycling to that, in the past you might add equestrianism and yachting.

These sports dominate in terms of number of events and also in terms of coverage, not because they have massive participation or viewer appeal, but because they are what the Olympics is really about.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Swimmer here! Have you watched snowboarding? Skiing? Gymnastics? Diving? Track & field?! Lol. Swimming looks like a lot of events because there’s heats, but really it’s not that many compared to other individual racing sports.

Anonymous 0 Comments

To add:

The obvious fact is swimming provides good eye candy. Not only are athletes very well toned and wearing very skimpy outfits, but the spectators in the stand have a good, consistent view and relatively few camera placements are needed to cover the pools.

But more seriously Olympics is representation of “amateur” sports and cricket is very heavily a professional sport with dedicated clubs and seasonal cups. Bowling and squash and tennis and soccer, etc etc all have professional leagues and it’s difficult drawing the line between the professional and “amateur” athletes. Especially trying to get “amateurs” that you can field with name recognition.