At the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, 21 new world records and 30 Olympic records were set - thanks in large part to controversial high-tech polyurethane swimsuits that increased swimmers' buoyancy and have since been swimsuit technology.
For that reason alone, fans of the sport should expect only a handful of world records to fall in London when swimming events get under way on Saturday. As Joel Stager of Indiana University's Councilman Center for the Science of Swimming wrote Thursday on the hydro+logic blog, "over time, swim times should improve in everÂsmaller increments as swimmers approach a theoretical limit to human performance. Unusually steep improvements in time tend to point to some form of recently introduced 'bias' to the contests. Such a jump occurred in 2008."
In fact, 2008's finishes are so far off the chart that Stager and his research colleagues did not even use them when formulating a statistical model that crunches the fastest eight male and female performances in Olympic swimming events between 1972 and 2004. Using the mean time across all years, a best-fit power curve was calculated for each swim event and will be used to predict finish times for the 2012 Olympics. To view the model and read more about Stager's research, click here.
Stager still expects intense competition between U.S. swimmers Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte to possibly result in new records, and based on his own model and swimmers' times posted at the 2012 Olympic Trials in Omaha, Neb., other U.S. swimmers such as Matt Grevers, Allison Schmitt, Dana Vollmer and Missy Franklin "all have shots at records."
