Olympic Champions and world record holders

It’s hard to believe that the Olympics Games in Beijing took place nearly a year ago given the many unforgettable performances witnessed by the world. For most people, one athlete’s performances stand out in particular. Michael Phelps undoubtedly took the show with an unprecedented 8 gold medals, 7 world records and 1 Olympic record. In total, Phelps has won more gold medals than any OIympian with 14 and has broken 35 world records the last of which he broke just today at the World Championships.

Phelps is definitely one of the greatest athletes of all time, with more to come. Call me biased, but Phelps’ records are a little overplayed relative to Bolt’s world record performances on the track at 100m, 200m and the 4×100m relay. Here’s why.

Since comparing the two sports directly isn’t an equal comparison, I will represent the records in terms of percentages.

The 50m freestyle and the 100m dash are the shortest sprint races contested at the Olympics in swimming and track and field respectively. a quick look at the world record progression (50m free/100m dash) shows that over the course of 33 years, the 50m freestyle world record has dropped 2.92 seconds, representing a 12.24% change. On the other hand, the 100m dash record (discounting the pre-electronic timing era) has fallen from 10.06 to 9.69; a 3.68% change over 44 years. Furthermore, in the case of swimming, we often see the same record broken multiple times in the same meet. In track, this hardly happens and the time in between record changes is much longer except when someone breaks their own record.

The same comparison can be made for the 100m freestyle and the 200m dash, the next distance up in each respective sport. Starting in 1975, until the 2008 Summer Games in which records were broken in both events, the swimming record fell 7.96% compared to the track record’s 2.27%. Looking at progressions for other records, the drop in the swimming records are much more dramatic over time compared to track records with track records being broken less frequently. It would seem, judging by the rate of world record progression, that swimming records have not approached the limit that track records are at currently.

This is also demonstrated by the fact that over the course of the last 8 years, Phelps has broken his own 200m butterfly record 7 times dropping his record by 2.96%. Usain Bolt broke his own 100m dash record by 0.31% and Michael Johnson’s 200m dash record by only 0.10%. Bolt’s 200 record was even even more impressive due to the fact that many considered Johnson’s 19.32 record as unbreakable. Phelps was able to break 7 records due to the sheer number of event distances and strokes for him to swim. As a versatile and dominant swimmer, he can swim the same distance using multiple strokes. Bolt doesn’t have the same options available to him.

Bolt’s records are a more impressive historic achievement despite the fact that the swimming records are broken with much greater margins and frequency. Swimming records still have some ways to go before athletes physical ability to break them will be questioned. Phelps is no doubt an astonishing athlete, but Bolt’s record breaking performances still awe me in a way that Phelps’ performances never did for me.

I realize my comparisons are highly unscientific and very rough so feel free to tell me I’m wrong. Although there are others with me on this one.

Further reading

• USA Today’s comparison of Bolt and Phelps
• http://kempton.wordpress.com/2008/08/16/usain-bolt-vs-michael-phelps/