I got a facebook message that my old university squad is in the final prep for the CIS championships, so I decided to have a look at past Ontario University results. the 2014 results don’t appear to be posted yet but apparently they are the fastest ever. So I had a look at the 2013 results, bear in mind that I haven’t been looking at the times regularly.
When I was in university, I was making finals in the 100/200 fly events and the 200 free, and consols in the 100 free. If I did my old times now, I wouldn’t even get a second swim in free or the 100 fly, and I’d barely make consols in the 200 fly.
When did these bloody kids get so fast? And why are they still on my lawn?
I’m with you. I come from a running background but when I was running in the NCAA it took about a 4:02 to make it to indoor nationals and now kids are getting left out of the meet running 3:58. I was in college just 10 years ago and things have gotten more competitive up front and a whole lot deeper.
I bet that is the majority of the improvement in times over the years. As you know, its a huge difference in the short course races. Underwater is faster than swimming the strokes (particularly in breast) so you end up removing a meter or two or more of swim speed pacing each length with something faster. David K
I think that’s some of it, particularly in the shorter free events, but I’m not sure about all of it. I mean, how far are the kids dolphining off the wall in the 200 fly, really? I doubt it is much farther than we were doing back in the early 90’s, in that event you just need air.
but whereas I placed 4th or 5th in 200 fly at Ontarios back in 93, and even got a second swim at CIAUs, now that same time might get me 14th at Ontarios and there is no possible way it would get a second swim at CIS.
Interesting observation… I read an article back in November about how kids are slower than their parents. I can’t recall the actual study I read, but this gives you the idea http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-24998497
I’m also not really comparing the top end, although I’m sure the winning times are quite a bit faster now also. It’s more the depth that I’m amazed at, and I suspect it’s got to do with more kids swimming in clubs and on high school teams. I’d be interested in seeing stats on how many club and HS teams and kids in those teams there are now compared to then.
When I was a child, the club I swam for trained once a week and I was good compared to other kids who trained once a week.
Then when I started competing at Masters level and was training 6 times a week, my times compared well to kids training a similar amount at lower level clubs.
But the local club where I live now, the kids are doing 50-60km a week, and the fastest are considerably faster than my PBs done with 20-30km a week. There seems to be a very strong correlation between how well a club does at national level and the number of pool hours it has per week.
I think that’s some of it, particularly in the shorter free events, but I’m not sure about all of it. I mean, how far are the kids dolphining off the wall in the 200 fly, really? I doubt it is much farther than we were doing back in the early 90’s, in that event you just need air.
They’re going pretty far. I know a couple of 12 yr old girls that will underwater all the way to the 15m mark off every wall without fail. One of them I’ve watched do it in both short and long course. Pretty impressive.
I think there’s a lot more emphasis on single sports nowadays. Kids that are swimmers do it year round. Runners are runners non-stop. When we were kids, the emphasis was on variety and getting involved in lots of different sports. There were lots of 3-4 sport athletes. There’s positives and negatives to both lines of thinking.
I bet that those kids at the pointy end are the kids that have been specialized at an early age and have a ridiculous amount of training hours under their belt.
If the high schoolers are putting up faster times than I was in HS: Their technology and training methods are better than mine, plus, they’re on drugs.
If the high schoolers are putting up slower times than I was in HS: Kids these days are soft. Don’t appreciate the hard work necessary to be fast.
There’s definitely a more one-sport focus nowadays than when I was a kid. We used to have seasons: spring sports, fall sports, winter sports and you mainly did that sport during that season. Now it seems the kids have to pick a sport when they’re young and focus year-round on it. Plus things have gotten severely competitive and at times I think the whole “sports should be fun for the kids” has been lost. The kids are definitely pushing the envelope far more than when I was that age and their parents are pushing them more than mine ever did. I listened to a coach last year telling the parents that their kids needed to be taking supplements and training daily if they expected to stay on the team…and this was a community rec soccer league for 12 year olds! Supplements and a daily training regimine for 12 year olds??? The kids may be faster/stronger/better than we were but at what cost?
I’ll concede that I’m not extremely talented at any sport so I don’t know what it’s like to be at the top 1% but it just seems like a shame to me that nowadays the kids don’t even get to play at sports before the adults teach them to treat it like a job. Whatever happened to the idea that kids should be doing sports because they enjoyed them and it’s fun? And after the game everyone goes for ice cream…********
I think club swimming has grown in popularity so you have a larger pool of swimmers and you have a lot of kids training year round from an earlier age.
I can’t help but think that the success of the American swimmers and a guy named Phelps as well as some notable females (Evans, Sanders, Coughlin, Ledecky, Torres to name a few) the last 24 years or so has had an impact. Plenty of “heros” for kids to look up to. Swimming seems to dominate the Summer Olympics now over track and field in the US at least.
I think it’s a golden opportunity for triathlon to take the “2nd tier” talent that also happen to enjoy or are accomplished runners, and build them into top ITU athletes. We’re more likely to find them in the pool than on the track. Easier to make a swimmer with good running talent in to a better runner, than to try and make a runner a swimmer. You can make anyone a good enough cyclist for draft legal if they have a world class engine.
I was at the Hyvee Ironkids championship last year and it was impressive to see the number of fairly large clubs/teams for these younger athletes. I can almost guarantee that ALL of them are on club swim teams most of the year, and the kids finishing up front are probably top swimmers by themselves.
I’ve working a plan to get a youth triathlon group off the ground through our YMCA and probably partner with the Y swim team. If nothing else it will give some kids a 2nd or 3rd sport to focus on so they don’t get burned out, and a place for the good by not great swimmers to find success outside of the pool.
Interesting observation… I read an article back in November about how kids are slower than their parents. I can’t recall the actual study I read, but this gives you the idea http://www.bbc
.co.uk/news/health-24998497
It seems to me that there are two observations:
that the top athletes keep getting better
that the “average” person keeps getting worse
It also seems that the demographics of sports change. Back in the 80s swimming was a competitive sport (ie 50,000+ yds/wk of training) in CA, FL, TX, AZ. Most other states might have had one or two teams, but swimming was mostly a recreational activity. Looking at junior national results I see finalists from every where. Much more representative of the nation.
My kids (11 and 13) play soccer- 4 practices per week + 2 games, 11 months a year. Only swimmers and gymnists were practicing that much back in the 80s. (And not that many of them). It seems like there are thousands of kids doing the same thing with soccer in AZ.
I know that football is supposed to be a big deal. But every summer when those kids show up at the track I run at, I am shocked at what I see. There are maybe two kids with any athleticisms at all. The rest are like rejects from fat camp. And that H.S. is famous for its football program.
Isn’t there only a certain amount of training that can be done at a high level before people/kids burn out? I though I was reading somewhere that while kids are starting younger and specializing in one sport the carryover into adulthood is reduced.
Can anyone correct me on this?
I don’t know about swimming as much, but I know the last couple of year the depth in OUA/CIS xc and track has increased a lot. I think some of that is because more of the top end runners are staying in Canada and not going to the ncaa. There could be a similar thing going on in swimming.