The world of swimming has run amuck with world records lately. The men’s 50 free and 100 free have been assaulted by Alain Bernard of France and Eamon Sullivan of Australia. Between the two of them I think the records were lowered 4 times. The interesting thing is that those records haven’t been touched in several years. Another long standing record that was taken down was the women’s 200 IM. Stephanie Rice of Australia was the first woman to break 2:09. That was one of the oldest records on the books. She also broke the record in the 400 IM and Federica Pellegrini broke the 400 free, those weren’t quite as old but they are just as impressive. The 50 back was lowered twice recently and Kirsty Coventry broke the 200 back. I think that is all the recent records.

I guess it isn’t unreasonable to expect fast swimming the Olympic year but the Olympics aren’t for several months. But people and the media seem not to believe that the records are just about people being better than they have ever been. I am not media and I don’t know any of the people who have set the records. The media is flooded with accusations of drug use and people saying that it is just the new swimsuit technology. As far as I know there is no evidence that any of those people have cheated in any way. All I can say for sure is that breaking a world record and winning Olympic gold are the two greatest things that can be accomplished in this sport. I hope that those people have been able to enjoy one of the greatest accomplishments in swimming and celebrate like they should.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 2:57 pm and is filed under robertmargalis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.