Best Swimming Nations: Women's Butterflies

After some hiatus as we moved through the fall Championship season, we’re back with the 3rd installment of our “best swimming nations” feature, where we take a look at which nations are the best in each of the individual World-Championship events. Because we love our readers just that much, we’ve decided to expand our lists to the top 15 nations, so that we can speak to a wider audience.

Keep in mind that the purpose of these lists is basically to serve as a “cheat sheet” for where one might look for the up-and-coming stars of each event, rather than some sort of medal predictions. We’ve also listed the top 3 times from the country in each event in 2011. These top 3’s are simply for reference, and are not necessarily the only times considered when making the rankings.

50 fly

The top three teams on this list have accounted for all of the gold medals in the event’s 10-year (6-meet) history at the World Championships. Australia has better depth that Sweden (much better than they showed this year, in fact), but Sweden gets the edge based on the tremendous history they have. Therese Alshammar won gold in 2007, and altogether they’ve won 7 medals out of a possible 18 in the event (the Americans, by comparison, have only 1 from Jenny Thompson in 2003). Denmark is an easy choice for #1. Between Inge de Bruijn (2001 and 2003) and Inge Dekker (2011), they’ve won half of the available World Championship golds. Not surprising for a sprint event, but the Dutch have incredible depth that goes even beyond the three listed, with Hinkelien Schreuder posting a 26.14 in Eindhoven

100 fly

The Americans were not the most impressive country in this 100 fly in 2011, but Dana Vollmer won the World Championship and with just a huge level of depth. The #2-rated Australians have won the last two Olympic championships, which is nothing to be scoffed at, though their depth too fell a bit short in 2011. The Chinese are hard-rising in the race. They’ve never won a (clean) Olympic medal in the event, but that’s likely to change next year. The Netherlands has a huge drop off after the 50, though one might imagine that if some of their sprinters (Kromowidjojo, etc.) swam this race, that these rankings might look differently.

200 fly

China swept the gold and the silver in this event at the 2008 Olympics, and at the 2011 World Championships they took gold and bronze. Not only that, but they have 5 swimmers who have gone sub-2:09 in the race.

Overall

Establishing an overall ranking, past the top 4, was very tough in this category, because (maybe moreso than any other stroke) there are huge fluctuations between some countries’ abilities in the different distances. Nobody is as balanced as the Australians through all three distances, so they get the nod, but as the Chinese continue to develop their sprint acumen they’ll likely move atop this listing.