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For many decades we’ve come to expect the U.S. Olympic swimming team to dominate every four years and with good reason. In 2016 at the Rio Olympics, for example, the U.S. team won 16 gold medals and 33 overall.
Australia placed second with 10 total medals. In these numbers, you’ve got unquestionable dominance.
I love watching the team do so well during the Olympics. And I predict they’ll continue to be the best in the world at swimming at the Tokyo Olympics – ending up with more medals than any other country.
But having watched the first few days of the U.S. Olympic Swimming Trials, I’m concerned the U.S. may not be as dominant in Tokyo as Rio and other recent Olympic Games.
It all starts with the fact that an Australian swimmer posted a time five seconds faster than Katie Ledecky this week in the 400-meter freestyle. Five seconds, as you know, is often an eternity in swimming. If this pattern holds in Tokyo, Ledecky may not win as many gold medals as we were expecting her to.
Don’t get me wrong. I want Katie to win and predict she will win at least two Golds and four medals overall. And I predict the U.S. will win more swimming medals than any other country.
But if they don’t win at least 30 medals we should all view this as a sign that American swimming is slipping as a superpower on the world stage.
And to what should we attribute this fall-off?
Maybe it’s American media outlets being so blinded in their beliefs about how great American swimmers are that they don’t allow objective, honest criticism and feedback to be heard often enough. Swimming blogs in this country are usually blatant cheerleaders that don’t allow in enough alternative voices about how the sport could be improved and more objective analysis of swimming performances.
The coverage is mostly rah-rah hype devoid of candid assessments of swimmers and the way the sport operates overall. Coverage needs to allow more objective insights and analysis into the discourse.
These excessively positive covers aren’t healthy for US swimming going forward. The great basketball coach, Coach K of Duke, credits his success in winning five national championships to being brutally honest with his players. I’m not sure the US swimming establishment has been honest and objective enough in its analysis of swimmers and how they’re performing.
Are American swimmers tough enough? Sure they are, among the toughest of all athletes. But could they be tougher? I wonder if they practice hard enough, push themselves to the limits of their physical abilities.
This is about the pursuit of excellence. And I haven’t seen this week during the U.S. Olympic Trials a whole lot of signs that this country’s swimmers are really ready to take their performances to the next level. I see mostly goodness but not greatness. I see inspiring performances but nothing that dazzles.
And I wonder if it’s because they’ve been told too many times how great they are and have started to believe all the hype they’re reading and hearing about themselves.
Maybe they should hear more of the truth, that there’s a good chance they won’t win as many medals as they did in Rio. That’s definitely a realistic possibility when you factor in Ledecky may not win Gold in all her races and Phelps isn’t walking onto the pool deck to sweep up a pile of medals for this country anymore.
Who is going to fill that void? The conventional wisdom says it’s Caeleb Dressel. But does he really have the stuff to haul in a pile of medals? I’m rooting for him. But we just don’t know for sure. It’s definitely not a certainty.
The American swimming stars may or may not come through. We just don’t know about what’ll transpire in Tokyo. In several of the most recent Olympics, we’ve been confident Phelps would boost America’s medal count by a lot. But Phelps is retired. He won’t win any medals in Tokyo.
And how about the relays? Australia and France continue to give Americans a ton of trouble in these all-important races packed with national pride on the line. Maybe in Tokyo, they’ll dominate the Americans. It could happen.
For the U.S. they’ll be a gaggle of swimmers in those relays who have never been in as big a pressure-packed a stage like the Olympics. I’m not sure they’ll rise to the challenge – even though like Americans I hope they do.
But if they don’t, the reign of the U.S. as the darlings of swimming around the world will start to be more widely questioned.
And we’ll have ourselves to blame for overhyping these swimmers, getting them to drink the Kool-aid about how great they are.
After Tokyo, American swimming may fall down a few notches in the eyes of the world. What then? This country will have to take a good hard look at its swimming programs, practice regimens, and how it covers the sport.
A great first step towards rebuilding this country into the ascending global power in swimming it once was would be to provide more balanced coverage of the swimming world. We’re getting too much now of the rah-rah cheerleading. It’s not going to make American swimmers as great as they can be.
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Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
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