For those of you who have been following David Rieder’s prediction contest, that includes many of the big names in the swim-blog community, we have an update at how everyone fared after the morning. This includes the David Rieder vs. Chris DeSantis throwdown for who is the rightful owner of “The Swim Geek”.
This list lists the number of finalists (out of a possible 18) who made the finals in their event tonight, followed by the places of the swimmers who didn’t. Thus far, Reed Shimberg, host of the “Checking in with” series over at Swimming World, is the only person to have all 18 medalist predictions go through to the finals. After that, there’s a big cluster with 17. Chris DeSantis will be fighting an uphill battle on day 1, as he lost 2 of his second place predictions already, and could be further hurt by the fact that Ryan Lochte is swimming the IM events (which Chris predicted he would not be.)
None of this means a whole lot until we see the results for finals tonight, but it’s still interesting to look at. The Swimmers Circle writers are in blue, and the battle for the title of Swim Geek is highlighted in red. Head over to swimdr549.blogspot.com to see a breakdown of everybody’s picks. We’ll update again after tonight’s finals.
1. Reed 18
2. Matt 17 (3rd)
2. Jerry 17 (3rd)
4. Braden 17 (2nd)
4. David 17 (2nd)
6. John 17 (1st)
7. Tom 16 (3rd, 3rd)
8. G. John 16 (3rd, 2nd)
9. Chris “Not the Swim Geek” DeSantis 16 (2nd, 2nd)
10. Andy 15 (2nd, 2nd, 3rd)
Overall, I’m very excited about my picks after the whole session. In addition to only missing 1 finalist (Alex Vanderkaay in the 200 IM), a lot of my “upset picks” on later days had very good swims in some off events (for example, Lyndsay DePaul, who is 6th in the 100 fly going into finals).
