2021 was a year filled with lots of swimming action including the Olympics, US Olympic Trials, SC World Championships, ISL season, and NCAA Championships. In fact, there was so much swimming going on in 2021, that recaps from the latter three events weren’t even amongst the top 50 most-read articles of the year on SwimSwam.
What did end up on the list? Multiple live recaps from Waves I and II of the US Olympic Trials, along with the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games found themselves as some of the most popular articles amongst swimming fans, making up over half of the list.
The most popular recap was actually the Wave II Day 1 Prelims live recap from the US Olympic Trials meet, which outranked every other session. Perhaps eager swim fans wanted to get their first look at the forming US Olympic Team, or wanted to see the battle brewing for some of the spots up for grabs during that first finals session. The highest Olympics live recap also came from the day 1 prelims session, ranking 16th on the overall list.
With them, there were several articles relating far beyond the swimming community, including several pieces surrounding Klete Keller’s role in the US Capitol Riots or Jeremy Kipp’s assault allegations at USC. Both stories occurred earlier in 2021, and still remain some of the most read articles in SwimSwam history. The initial story reporting Keller’s involvement in the riots was the second most-read article of the entire year.
More recent articles detailing Lia Thomas’ journey in NCAA Swimming and breaststroke disqualifications at the SC World Championships are still gaining popularity. If there were more days left in 2021, these articles may have found themselves higher on the list.
Check out the most-read articles of 2021, including a breakdown by type of article.
Top 50 Most Read Articles of 2021 – Overall
Live Recaps
| Overall Rank | Article |
| 4 | |
| 6 | |
| 7 | |
| 8 | |
| 11 | |
| 12 | |
| 13 | |
| 15 | |
| 16 | |
| 18 | |
| 21 | |
| 22 | |
| 25 | |
| 27 | |
| 28 | |
| 30 | |
| 31 | |
| 34 | |
| 35 | |
| 37 | |
| 39 | |
| 40 | |
| 42 | |
| 43 | |
| 44 | |
| 45 | |
| 50 |
Non-Recap
| Overall Rank | Article |
| 1 | |
| 2 | |
| 3 | |
| 5 | |
| 9 | |
| 10 | |
| 14 | |
| 17 | |
| 19 | |
| 20 | |
| 23 | |
| 24 | |
| 29 | |
| 32 | |
| 33 | |
| 36 | |
| 38 | |
| 41 | |
| 46 | |
| 47 | |
| 48 | |
| 49 |
Can we get numbers for how these were picked and how many people clickes? Or is that private information.
That comment from the Klete Keller article (#2) with 1.6k dislikes… gotta be the most disliked comment on this site, right?
wowee. even compared to other comments with more dislikes than likes on that article, that ratio is off the charts
I wanna see most upvoted comments of the year
I wish we could pull that, but storing that kind of data for every comment would take an insane amount of database space…so sadly we don’t have it.
1.6k downvotes has to be close to the most-downvoted comment ever. Though, I’m sure now that I’m posting this, someone is going to try to make a bot to break that record.
Somehow, it got 226 likes
The state of America, brother.
My guess is that the Number 1 article got lots of traffic from those outside the swimming community? Given that it’s about the Olympics more generally.
Would explain how it beat out the Klete Keller article, which I expected to be top. That was a huge scoop.
Yes, that’s correct re: the doping article. Was picked up on lots of different FB pages and some niche forums for other sports.
Keller was a huge scoop, but links from other news sources don’t drive nearly as much traffic as you would think.
Hi SwimSwam,
I am curious how this works. Is it page visits, or unique visitors. For example, I was “working” during trials. To keep up with results and comments I kept coming back to the page when I could. Did I count as one or 27?
I know it’s based in America, but I’m surprised the trials recaps beat the Olympics recaps. Weird.
Maybe it’s because many readers’ family and friends were at trials. Not many went to the Olympics.
Still more comments on the Olympics recaps.
Probably more could watch Olympics then trials. Trials had less air time and were during work hour in US.
It’s very much a timing issue. The Olympics had much, much lower traffic than 2016, which aligns with the lower US television ratings, mostly because of the time zones.
Our overall traffic was much higher than 2016, but Olympic traffic was lower, which was interesting for us. People were excited for swimming in 2021, but the Olympics fell flat. I don’t think that would surprise most people who have been watching for a while.
About 60% of our traffic is from the US, about 40% is from “the rest of the world.”
Tokyo time zones are inconvenient for most of the world. European traffic for the Olympics was terrible – probably because finals were in the middle of the night… Read more »
I understand. But weren’t swimming finals in the morning just so it could be prime time in the USA?
and I wonder if the lack of Phelps affected interest in the US?
They were in the morning just for the US and this in turn actually screwed Europe because night finals would’ve been during the day time for them.
It was actually a pretty convenient timezone for billions of people but the proportion of people interested is just much higher in Europe and the Americas than in Asia.
The elephant in the room is NBC who’s actually responsible for screwing Europe. Night finals would’ve been during the day for Europeans so they would’ve been watchable by everyone from East Asia to Western Europe which covers the vast majority of Earth’s population including the rapidly growing Africa. So really the timezone isn’t inconvenient for most of the world it’s just inconvenient for your part of the world and if there are night finals at LA28 Western Europe will suffer again but it’ll be day time for us in East Asia/Oceania.
Braden said there was even low interest in the US and low US TV ratings. Weird. Maybe winning fewer gold medals affected that but they still won 11 gold I think.
My sense – and I don’t have data to back this up – that there was a lot of confusion over the time zones. That it made things feel a little disjointed for the average American, and it was unclear what was live and what wasn’t live.
I think NBC also gets a little worse every year at how they present the Games. I think they’re still sort of presenting it in a 2008 way when it’s 2021 and the market has shifted the way they consume media. I think, in general, people want to be MORE into things than they used to be. They want more detail. But NBC is still presenting it in a way that people want… Read more »
Thank goodness in Australia channel 7 was pretty clear on what was live and what wasn’t. And you could use an app to see other sports live. Swimming finals are one of their main priorities.