A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats? Olympic Universality Athletes In The Sprint Freestyle Events

Universality is a key tool for World Aquatics to help grow the sport in countries where it isn’t currently well established. Funding and infrastructure development often come based on visibility on the international stage. The ultimate goal for World Aquatics is to improve the level of elite swimming globally, but there’s no hard and fast rule for how to do so. Universality, leading to increased accessibility, is one way – the more people that have access to a good level of swimming, the greater the pool of elite athletes.

There are certainly success stories in that regard, but how does that translate to the times in the pool? We’ll take a look at some recent Olympic results for universality athletes in the most popular events, the 50 and 100 freestyle, and see how they’ve changed since 2012.

What is Universality?

Although the Olympics have their own universality rules, swimming is almost unique in that the places are allocated by the international federation (WA) rather than the IOC.  World Aquatics rules for the Paris Olympics state:

NOCs without any qualified athlete or relay team may enter a maximum of two (2) athletes – one (1) man and one (1) woman (Universality Places) in one (1) event each. 

There are some additional scenarios the rules address, but they are all essentially variations on this: each national body has the right to send two swimmers to the Olympics. However, they can’t pick whoever they want – the swimmers must be the ones with the highest WA points in an Olympic event.

The way these rules are set out tie in with WA’s own development program, especially their scholarship program. This takes ~100 swimmers per year from across the globe, placing them at one of five World Aquatics training centers for either one or two years. This does have a tangible effect. Sajan Prakash, the man who in 2021 achieved India’s first-ever Olympic ‘A’ cut, was a scholarship holder.

Another is the Pools for All program. This aims to develop swimming, teaching and coaching facilities in World Aquatics member nations where these are in short supply, and visibility on the Olympic stage is a powerful tool for the National Bodies of those nations.

An example: Eric ‘the Eel’ Moussambani, the winner of Heat 1 of the men’s 100 free at the Sydney Olympics. He only won the heat because the other two athletes were disqualified. He’d only taken up swimming nine months before the Games after hearing an advert on the radio about the opportunity to claim universality spots.

Having trained in the only pool available to him, which was 12m long and only available from 5-6 am, when he turned up to the selection trials there was only one other athlete there: Paula Barila Bolopa, who also swam in Sydney. They had no coach during their preparations, and Moussambani turned up on the morning of his heat in beach shorts (a South African coach gave him a regulation costume and goggles, telling him ‘You are going to be disqualified’).

Today, Moussambani is the National Coach, and Equatoguinean swimmers have competed at recent Olympics, World Championships and Youth Olympic Games. The swimming infrastructure now in Equatorial Guinea wouldn’t be there if those places hadn’t been available.

The Methodology

We won’t look at the athletes towards the bottom of the results – as access increases that bottom end stays relatively stable. Swimming is still at the level where countries are sending participants to the Games for the first time, and these debuting swimmers are as a rule around the same level.

We also won’t look at those universality swimmers at the top, partly because we should treat the upper and lower end of our data the same and partly because we’re most interested in what’s going on in the middle, not at the extremes.

The cut we take leaves us with the middle 50%. A ‘successful’ universality program should improve the mean result from this section and narrow the spread of results – more swimmers, swimming faster and more consistently. It should also reduce the gap from these swimmers to the top – those in the final

We get this section by taking the swims within the interquartile range of the results of universality athletes, which takes the 25th percentile up until the 75th. From these results, we’ll take the mean and the interquartile range (IQR). Finally, just for fun, we’ll see how the mean for these universality athletes compares to the mean time from the final of each event.

We’re looking at the sprint freestyle (50 & 100) events from the past four Olympics: 2012-2024. Universality did exist before this, as it has been done in Olympic sports since 1896, but this was the first year that there was good swimming data about it. Four Olympics isn’t enough to make a definitive answer, but we can observe the beginnings of some trends.

Results

Women’s

 Men’s

 What do we see? The main trend is that times across the four events are getting faster. Even in just four editions, universality times have improved both in raw time and compared to the final average. The spread of results (IQR) is a bit all over the place, but both the upper and lower quartiles are coming down. The data still clearly hits two of the conditions we set out earlier to show improvement – it looks as though there is a positive trend in universality results.

Another trend in this data is that the women’s times are advancing more quickly than the men’s. The percentage of improvement from 2012-2024 in the averages is 6% and 5.36% for women, and 2.42% and 4.61% for men. This should not come as a surprise – barriers to development in women’s sports have only really been coming down in the last 50 years – so we’d expect grassroots programs to have a more noticeable impact on their times.

The Flip Side

We’re getting more swimmers making the ‘A’ cut (OQT), and more universality places, but the increase in those two categories is greater than the total increase in the number of athletes. So what gives?

The ‘B’ cut (OCT) swimmers. How many of those were there in the men’s 100 freestyle in Paris for example? Just one, Mikel Schreuders, and he was Aruba’s only swimmer, so he fell under the universality conditions.

Here are three swimmers who just missed out on the OQT and didn’t qualify: Heiko Gigler (Austria), Jere Hribar (Croatia) and Shane Ryan (Ireland). All three of them would have made the semi-finals with their best times from 2024.

A swimmer from a country that is moderately successful and has three or four swimmers fighting for ‘A’ or ‘B’ cuts needs to be at a much higher level to make the Olympics than one from a country that doesn’t give swimming much support.

That’s great for countries getting a foothold on the ladder, but the gap from a universality place to one earned by hitting an OQT or OCT is massive – it’s difficult to take a step up. A country that takes three swimmers to the Olympics is likely far ahead of one that only takes two.

That’s why although some countries may have an enigmatic swimmer – Hanser Garcia for Cuba, Jason Dunford for Kenya – it can be difficult to translate that into consistency.  Some small nations do manage it. Trinidad & Tobago has transitioned from George Bovell to Dylan Carter and likely soon to Nikoli Blackman, but not two of them at any one time. Unless both hit an ‘A’ cut, only one gets to go to the Games. For countries on the rise but not yet broken through that glass ceiling to multiple ‘A’ cuts, universality places can be a double-edged sword.

To Conclude

Universality does seem to be improving the standard among universality swimmers. The overall standard of the top 40-50 swimmers has actually stayed fairly regular over the past three Olympics, and we’re still yet to see a universality swimmer (other than Kayla Sanchez, who switched allegiance from Canada to the Philippines in 2023) make a semi-final in either of these two events.

The program is providing what its set out to do – increase the pool of countries on the Olympic stage – but we may see a stratified competition evolve. As the ‘A’ cut gets faster and ‘B’ cut swimmers get fewer (or no) spaces, the gap between the top-end universality and bottom-end ‘A’ cut will become more pronounced.

Maybe WA will change how they assign the spaces. Potentially something similar to World Athletics might arise where the places are based on both a qualifying time and world rankings – but universality places will and should still have a part to play. Most of us may not see the effect, but just by being there these athletes inspire change back home.

We mentioned Eric Moussambani earlier, but we’ll come back to him. He trained in that 12m hotel pool because there were no Olympic-sized pools in Equatorial Guinea. Today there are two.