Word on the street is that swimming times are much faster today than in the 80’s, by a significantly large degree.
Yet I know that in the 1980’s, teams like East Germany’s national squad doped up hardcore and trained for their entire lives.
So how could people get so much faster so quickly? I presume East Germany well-nourished their olympic athletes and gave them top trainers and medical care (even if the other suckers in the country went without).
I don’t get it.
Much progress has been made in understanding the effects of training .
Those crazy suits.
It’s not like swimming is unique in that regard, and times in the 80s were faster than the 60s.
Part of the reason behind the swath of records in Beijing was the pool was deeper and wider than normal, which reduced the slowing effect of interference waves bouncing off the bottom and sides.
As for Phelps specifically, he’s large and strong, and has unusually large paddles (hands and feet). Nutrition and training technologies are lightyears beyond what they had back then. Infinity pools (swimming treadmills) and video-based tweaking of strokes, etc.
Someone get in touch with Mythbusters and see if they’ll make a swim suit with golf ball-like dimples.
Speedo has much better engineers than two old special effects guys.
There is no need to single out swimming on this. The records for almost all seemingly simple sports from running to swimming have all-time records that are sometimes beaten multiple times on the same new day by different people. The biggest factor is probably the widening of the contestant pool (no pun intended). For example, marathon running is about as simple as sports get. The 2011 Boston Marathon winner, Geoffrey Mutai of Kenya won in 2 hours and 3 minutes making it an all time marathon record although he wasn’t eligible for the official record because the course isn’t a standard one (it is much harder than other world-class marathons which disqualifies it for some dumb reason). Many competitors now run the marathon at a pace faster than most people can run any distance at all.
Some people from exceptional populations from around the world are gifted at certain sports and now that real money can come from it, some decide to make it a short-term career and a the best of those blow out the elite athletes from the much more restricted athlete population in times past. Good for them. With close to 7 billion people in the world, a few of them will be able to do incredible things now that travel and money are accessible. Granted, this doesn’t apply to your question of swimming as much but the point is that all world-class athletes don’t just compete against their current competitors but also all of those of the past and they do whatever they need to do to beat those times.
Yeah, seconds were each about 3% longer back then…
It’s disqualified because it’s a mostly downhill course. Except for the Newton Hills you’re running downhill the whole way. The hills aren’t insignificant, but to today’s elite they can be managed. With the proper training and a constant tailwind as occurred this year it can be a fast course. Not for me, I ran a slow pace but I’m assured that the leaders were quite fast this year. 