It's gotta be the suits (world records in swimming)

Ryan Lochte is smiling, but what about everybody else?

I am suffering from a bit of Olympics withdrawal, and getting quite a bit of pressure from someone, so I thought would write one more thing about an Olympic sport before they go away for four years.

Setting a world record in swimming is extremely tough these days. At the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing the eight 100 meter events (Free, Back, Breast and Fly for men and women) saw six world records set – three in the Men’s 100 Free alone. By comparison the 2012 London games witnessed only two world records in the same set of events. Factor in the 4x100 relays (Medley and Free) and the 400 IM and Beijing gets an additional six records for a total of 12 while London sees only two more to bring the total to four.

Of course back in Beijing swimmers could wear full body suits made of polyurethane, reducing their drag relative to bare skin and providing buoyancy. In the summer of 2009, as swimmers were setting records by the poolfull (get it?) at the World Championships in Rome, swimming’s governing body banned the suits effective January 1^st 2010.

So what has all this done for the state of swimming world records? Were these suits responsible for the success or have swimmers found new ways to train that make those records achievable.

Why does China win so many gold medals?

With the Games of the XXX Olympiad fully underway in London, I thought I would turn myself towards some Olympic numbers. I fully intended to do a look at declining records for speed across sports (swimming, track and field, cycling and so on) and still might get to it, but I was intrigued by a different statistic before I could get that effort off the ground.

China has become a dominant player in the Cold War-era game of topping the Olympic medal table. Since their return to the games in 1984 after 32 years – China boycotted the Olympics between 1952 and 84 due to the presence of the Republic of China, known in the IOC since 1979 as Chinese Taipei – they have won 385 medals in seven Summer Olympics. This obscures somewhat their recent run of strong results with 221 of those medals having come in the last three games. What prompted further inquiry was not the volume, however, but the composition of the total.