eh, but for the swim-fast with high stroke count, it seems to help to be female ;-)
not many (any ?) of the male swimmers have the high turnover..

Well, it has a lot to do with her 2 beat kick the whole way. when she needs to pick up the pace, stroke counts increases. I watched it again today and your count seems correct. There are times, I know she is breathing but I can't see it because she does it so efficiently, in the wake, and so quickly. very impressive.

Ah les petites (grandes) française, so impressive! What amazes me the most is her kicking. It looks so relaxed and efficient. Sprint distance swimmers are impressive, but they look like spending a lot of energy and it doesn't look like something we (I at tleast) should try to emulate for long distance swimming, when her style looks more suitable for long distance swimming and having 'fresh' legs at the end of the swim ... ready for what really matters.

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Francois-Xavier Li @FrancoisLi
"We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing." George Bernard Shaw
http://www.swimrunfrance.fr
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she's either got really short arms, or she isn't holding all the water she could. This means she's definitely the fittest person in the pool, and potentially she could get faster if she held more water.

or she's got really short arms.

One question I have is cadence vs oxygen. The higher your cadence, the more fresh air you are getting. Is this a benefit if by the end of the race you got 10% more fresh air?

To the person who said that the top men don't swim like her, well none of them are that small either, so with a smaller wingspan a short person needs to use more strokes to hold the same pace in the water.

Dev

I've been TIVOing the match and slowing down the action to look at the swimmers, and frankly it's messing me up.

Like you I started counting strokes and was amazed at how high the women's stoke counts were. I'm also trying to figure out how Phelps gets his head down so low just prior to his catch. Seems like that would stop me dead in the water.

It's pretty cool though. This Aussie coverage is awesome.

its a cadence, you are breathing more often, but also have less time to complete a breath. There is a technique to exhaling under water and inhaling as quickly as possible, but when your strokes are that quick and in a 200 free, you are in complete oxygen debt the whole time anyway. Breathing more often but with less time per breath probably works out in the end. Longer distances with a slower cadence, probably in her favor.

most of the swimmers with a higher cadence breathe bilaterally or else take more strokes before breathing. the people with slower rates will quite often just breathe to one side everytime they go to stroke on that side in a race longer than 50m (or on second 50 of 100m).

There are a couple of TI-style women out there like Otylia Jedrzejcak but for the most part, women's distance free has become a high turnover game since Janet Evans.

If you get a chance to watch video of Jedrzejcak and Manaudou swimming next together, it's really a case study in different freestyle styles.

For the 400 and up, Manaudou's pretty much a two-beat kicker.