I read about a swimmer called Anthony Ervin who got an Olympic gold medal at 35 for a 50m freestyle event.
I’m 33 and have been swimming for about 10 years. I’ve put a fair bit of time into swimming during this time period, like months at a time going daily for multiple pretty long sessions.
One issue is my skin breaking down when I go a lot which has resulted in me taking long breaks from swimming.
I can do things like an hour non stop of butterfly and I’ve picked up a lot of the swimming technique like tumble turns and things related to streamlining.
I get praise sometimes for my stamina when I swim as I swim pretty non stop when I’m there and maintain a good speed.
This is all quite vague in a way when it comes to how I perform. I don’t always measure how fast I do different things in swimming but I’ve compared a distance I covered in 55 minutes of pretty non stop front crawl to a chart online and it put me into the advanced but not elite category of swimmers.
I’m under 6 foot tall but not short. I’m at the higher end of 5 foot something.
When I started swimming about 10 years ago I was pretty unfit for different health reasons.
Do you think my attempts are likely to end in failure? I’m quite introverted so I’m not even sure I would want to be involved in something like a big swim race.
Do you think however much I trained it wouldn’t work out?
To be fair I haven’t been that clear about times I’ve achieved but I have said times put me into an advanced but not elite category.
Please don’t take this the wrong way, but your post comes across as extremely naïve to the point that I initially wondered whether it is really a serious question or just bait.
First, while it is true that Anthony Ervin won an Olympic gold medal at the age of 35, he also won an Olympic gold medal at the age of 19. He is not an example of somebody who only took up swimming as an adult.
Secondly, while being able to swim butterfly for an hour may sound impressive, it is not very relevant for competitive swimming. The longest butterfly event at the Olympics is 200 metres.
What would be relevant, on the other hand, would be your times from recent swim meets. The fact that you didn’t provide any makes me assume that you aren’t regularly participating in swimming competitions. If my guess is correct, that should be your first step. Join a Masters swimming group, participate in some local meets, but prepare yourself mentally to be humbled by people who have been swimming competitively since childhood.
I don’t like to shatter your dreams, but I feel very confident to say that, with your background in the sport, you’ll never make it to the Olympics in swimming. Qualifying for the Olympics is very hard in any sport, requiring not only training a lot and well but also extraordinary athletic talent. On top of that, swimming in particular is a very technical sport, with the consequence that even an extremely athletically gifted adult-onset swimmer would struggle to compete against other talented swimmers who have been swimming competitively since they were a child.
There are other sports where the barrier of entry is somewhat lower, cycling for example. You still won’t find many elite cyclists who weren’t already very athletic in their youth, but it’s not difficult to find examples of professional cyclists who excelled in another sport before switching to cycling in their late teens or even in their twenties: Florian Lipowitz (biathlon), Remco Evenepoel (association football), Primož Roglič (ski jumping), Michael Woods (running). But I am not aware of any top-level swimmer with a comparable athletic career.
Even these examples are of athletes who competed at the highest level in those sports as youth, before switching to another sport. And even then, its typically one aerobic sport to another.
For USA Swimming we have qualifying standards, so check your times. If you’re truly that fast, get into USA Swimming to hit that standard at a meet, then you can look towards Olympic trials.
(FWIW: it’s about the top 1%)
Also the 10k open water swim might favor someone in their 30s but the qualifying process is a lot more complicated.
I don’t want to be a downer, but OP is almost certainly not in the top 1%. If you’re in the top 1% and have even the remotest shot at making the Olympic trials in any sport (never mind make the team, and then gold medal), you know exactly what your times are, what it takes to make the Olympic trails, what day they occur, and who else is competing, what your strategy needs to be, etc.
OP - I wish you well in your quest, but gold medalists or even Olympic qualifiers don’t just show up at 35.
I was suggesting the U.S. time standards as an objective way to answer his own question.
Now if the goal was “just” going to the Olympics at all (he didn’t mention which country) then it could be a little slower.
As for age, I remember some late 30s men not getting through trials that were long time swimmers. Age quickly punishes sprinters.
There was Ashley Twichell who qualified in the marathon swim at age 32 for the first time. But she was a college swimmer, previous experience in the 1500.
Olympic gold medalist compared to a good 30 year old swimmer is just so far apart. That is why people have been a bit surprised by your post
If you’re looking to challenge yourself I’d suggest doing a big swimming competition like a 10km open water event and mix and match it with the other competitors in your category, like an Oceanman event.
Otherwise I hope you enjoy learning new skills, like 25m under water, sprinting and then doing individual medleys
I think a- they may be deluded or b- they have no idea how things work. In either case there is a very simple way to figure this out… choose an event, train for it and see if they can even qualify for regional trials… then maybe Olympic trials and finally being able to hit the times required to win… that is a lot of hurdles to get over. Remember they think they can win gold not just compete. their reference point is someone who won a gold, then 10 years or so later came back and did it again… obviously it was not that they were 35, it was the fact they were really good from an early age. This is not a very well thought out question.
Doesn’t matter what your times are. If you’re not a household name within the swimming federation of your country, you’re not winning gold at 35.
This is either troll or the Dunning-Kreuger effect at its finest. Nobody asking on a triathlon message board about what it takes to win a gold medal has any chance of winning a gold medal. The reason is simple - if you were relatively close to even qualifying for the Olympics, you’d already know your answer and what it might would take to get you there. You’d know your times, and where they stood vs the top end of the sport. But more importantly, so would your coaches and your national federation. You’d already have made a plan 10 years ago on how you were going to train and compete for the 2028 Olympics and a path that got you there.
I’m not trying to be mean or anything - but this is the reality of not just qualifying for the Olympics never mind winning a gold medal. There are very few sports (none?) where you can just train on your own, and then waltz in with a gold medal past what’s generally considered to be prime athletic age. This isn’t a Disney movie where the hero tries really hard and there’s a training montage.
