1.) Judging from Marchand’s 200br final, I think he could have easily won the 100br too.
2.) With respect to that 100 freestyle WR… I don’t even understand how it’s physically possible. The guy is not that tall, not with a great wingspan, not especially muscled, not especially lean, not with any body type characteristics that resembles the commonly defined genetic swimmer. He didn’t have chlorine hair. His start wasn’t the difference. Neither was his turn. Yet, he dog walked the best the world had to offer and destroyed his own WR in a meh pool. I understand jumping to drug use, not as a character assassination, but as a potential answer to a total mystery. Even if you were to go with drug use, what drug??? You’d need magic to make me go that fast – straight magic.
If you look at the 100m on the track Andre DeGrasse falls into this category. He looks like a regular, guy, does not looks that strong, not your typical sprinter body type, but has insane fast twitch and force application for his body size and weight (you often see people like that in the weight room doing insane max squats with tiny bodies and no muscle definition that you would expect). Is this possible in swimming? Just huge fast twitch application of force while being streamlined as he does that? I don’t know, just asking.
for 46 second event, you still need a large aerobic capacity though. It’s not like 9.8 second 100m sprint. So all the drugs that enhance oxygen carrying capacity would make a difference if not you can do the entire race barely breathing.
Hmmm… Oxygen carrying capacity drugs sound good, but I’ve never heard of them making much of a difference in a race that’s this short. I’m not saying this as an expert – or someone that’s even tried any illegal performance enhancers – I’ve just never even heard of anything like that as an option for 100m races.
Don’t think of it as WR’s, think of it as PB’s. Pan is only 19. He improved by 0.4s in the last year. That’s pretty typical of kids in their late teens.
as far as height, he’s listed as 1.9m on wiki, which is like 6’3. That’s maybe an inch shorter than Caesar Cielo. Quite a bit shorter than James Magnussen, a bit taller than Cam McEvoy. and same height as Caleb Dressel. (just picking those guys because they’ve all either had or been within a fingernail of the WR at some point).
