Sure, different distances, combinations, course styles (hurdles, steeplechase, road, cross country etc) but none of them are repeated and limited to a specific style of locomotion that is less fast.
I don’t think the logic is particularly hard to grasp. The exact analogy for running would be to have an additional set of the exact same standard running distances but force people to hop, crawl or run backwards.
I could see the argument that there are too many swimming events. I don’t agree with it but I understand the argument. I was just explaining why it was important to add the womens 1500 and mens 800 this year. The easiest and fairest way to reduce the number of swimming events IMO would be to eliminate the 200m category. That would reduce the total number of events from 18 to 12, but keep all the disciplines.
There are 15 different running events, including race walking, hurdles, and steeple. There’s also a bunch of different throwing events, why have hammer, shot put, discus, and javelin? There’s two different jumping events, why don’t they run down the track and cut the triple jump? Who needs to hop skip and jump? Why do we need a pole to jump over another pole? What’s wrong with just seeing who can jump the highest with just their legs?
But… who cares? Unless you think it’s somehow a conspiracy to pad the (meaningless) “medal counts” of countries that are good at swimming, why does it matter? The general community of people-who-follow-or-participate-in-swimming-as-a-competitive-sport have decided that that’s the right number and variety of different competitions to have. And those competitions are (presumably) competed in by large numbers of people around the world. If in 50 years there are 8 different popular, spectated varieties of basketball, then there could legitimately be 8 varieties of basketball as olympic sports. If track and field, as a sport, starts adopting walk-backwards-races and hopping-races, and people who follow that sport find it all compelling and entertaining enough to actually run competitions around the world, then those should become olympic events.
Different sports, broadly defined, have different numbers of medal competitions. Swimming has a lot. How does that negatively affect anyone, at all, in the slightest, ever?
Obviously the logic is too difficult to grasp.
My issue is not with multiple different events, it is with multiple versions of the same event. Your examples would be relevant if you could point to me the olympic medals awarded for the 100m, 200m, 400m, 800m 1500m, 5000m and 10,000m backwards runs, and another set for hopping, and another set for running sideways. I’d be saying that those too were utterly pointless and why don’t they just let them run from point A to point B in the fastest way they know how.
(Plus “race walking” is self-evidently not a running event. The clue is in the name and yep, I’d be perfectly happy for it to be removed from the olympics)
Race walking, you say?
I think the “too many swimming events” people (amongst which I count myself, kinda) see them as being too similar, in that the same people are competitive in a huge portion of them.
There are 17 events in swimming (per gender). Phelps won 8 events in a single games, and the 4 top athletes for medals in a single Olympics are all swimmers.
There are 13 events in track plus the marathon, for a comparable total. Historically the record for medals in these events is 5, by Paavo Nurmi at the the 1924 Paris games, in 1500m, 5000m, individual & team cross-country, and team 3000m, but three of those are not current events. With the current events, the most any single athlete is competitive in is 3 (100m, 200m, 4x100m) although twice athletes that have won those three events have also won the long jump (Jesse Owens and Carl Lewis).
There is considerably less variation in the athletic demands amongst the swimming events as compared to the running events, as is evidenced by the frequency of single athletes winning multiple medals in their respective sports. The longest swimming event is 16x longer than the shortest. The longest running event is 422x longer than the shortest. The number of swimming events and the similarity between them just seems a bit silly. If they dropped a couple disciplines but added 50m, 3k, and 5k distances it would seem less silly even though the number of events wouldn’t change that much.
The thing is, swimming is organized as it is because at swim meets outside of the Olympics they want to hold all those events, which is totally fine. If the international governing body of the sport wants to hold events where they run a whole bunch of races that are almost the same, who really cares? It only really grates on me when people gush about how Phelps is the greatest Olympian ever because he won 8 races that had almost identical athletic requirements, as compared to athletes that have won multiple medals in more disparate sports.
The walking events are dumb and shouldn’t be in the Olympics but will probably never be dropped because tradition or some bs.
Just watched the US women win 3x3 basketball gold. Very nice and I totally agree this sport should remain as part of the Olympics. Lots of fun, very accessible, basketball is popular throughout much of the world. Deserves to have this in the Olympics.
Just watched the men’s 3x3 gold medal match and it ended with a thrilling two-pointer from Latvia. What a sport and what a great game!
Thrilling.
ROC gets silver in men and women.
I’m not sure that swimming has too many as much as other sports have too few. (And I use “sports” in a very general sense where soccer, rugby, handball, and hockey are all variations of a single field sport.)
The Olympics are a collection of International meets and competitions crammed into the same city for a two week time period. Olympic swimming is essentially just like any other swim meet in the world with it’s variety of strokes, distances, and medleys. It’s ridiculous to expect the organizing bodies to change that structure every four years just so there is medal parody with other sports that also have established formats they use the other 206 weeks of the quadrennial. Swimmers are always going to walk away with more medals than other athletes the same way baseball players are going to win more games than football players. Any country that cares that much about medal counts, better start building more swimming pools.
Yeesh. Nikita Nagornyy has apologized for letting his team down and feels sad and “ashamed” of himself because he got bronze in the individual all-around.
This from the guy that 48 hours ago formed the backbone of a team effort that achieved the first team gold for Russian men’s gymnastics in 25 years.
The pressure these athletes put on themselves is unreal. Sam Mikulak falling in two consecutive floor exercises and bouncing up with a shrug and a “whatcha gonna do, eh” smile was a bit refreshing, honestly. I don’t think anybody is ashamed of Nagornyy or feels like he let them down except in his own head. Go drink a beer or something, dude.
Well, I think you need look at how well the top medalists compare to the next in their there same sport. Phelps has 14 more gold medals than the next swimmer. Meanwhile the top 4 track & field have 9, 9, 8, and 8 gold medals. If it’s so easy to get that many gold medals because there’s so many swimming events, then the question is “then why hasn’t anyone else done it?”
Which she is providing.
Anyone who thinks Biles should “suck it up” and just compete even though she is not feeling up to it should absolutely read the Elena Mukhina link that nearwildheaven posted.
Not me, as I said in the next sentence.
Ok, maybe I misspoke in saying I didn’t grok the logic, what I meant is I don’t grok the arbitrariness of it. To me, the difference of running 400m but relay seems less consequential than completely changing your orientation in the water.
But anyway, none of this matters, people are going to disagree on which sports are the most interesting, or most valid, and I guess we’re not going to get anywhere with this.
Coming from my perspective that swimming is 8 splashes moving at slightly different speeds and the long term squeeze being a representative level swimmer this 1st world issue causes considerable angst in the PT household.
I expect most of you might recall back many many moons ago at the school swimming carnivals where the same guy in your age group won every swimming disciple over every distance. Their sister did also, as with the younger brother. The same family wins almost every event in the entire carnival.
To an alarmingly similar extent, the same with the Olympics.
With swimming, one guy can win the fucking lot.
On the track and field, the guy who wins the 100m is not the same guy who wins the 110m hurdles. No guy who makes the 100m final tries to win the 400m. The guy who wins the 3000m steeple doesn’t finish on the podium for the 5000m. No guy who runs attempts the walk. The hammer, shot put, discus and javelin are won by different guys with profoundly different build, skills and attributes.
Swimming is homogenous.
Wait, really? Has this every happened, even taking into account exaggeration? Like the same swimmer winning the 1500m and the 100m? I’d like to see some evidence of that.
???
Google Mark Spitz, or Michael Phelps
At one stage Shane Gould held every women’s freestyle world record from 100m to 1,500m
There wasn’t a 50m world record at the time, but she was still the world’s fastest at that too.
A couple of swimmers at Tokyo have the prospect of winning medals in 8-10 events.
Exceptional athletes, no doubt but just fortunate to have a lot of Olympic events within their skill set.
Watching an American women’s beach volleyball team play against Kenya and Keyna is getting killed. Brutal blowout.