Caeleb Dressel Breaks All Of Your Time Converters

Written and courtesy of Kevin Hallman

This past weekend at NCAA championships, Florida’s Caeleb Dressel broke his own national record in the 100 yard freestyle with a jaw-dropping 40.00.

So exactly how fast is that? Stupid fast? Crazy fast?

For comparison, here are the results from the final of the 100 yard freestyle at this year’s NCAA championships.

1. Dressel, Caeleb JR Florida: 40.00
2. Chadwick, Michael SR Missouri: 40.95
3. Held, Ryan JR NC State: 41.21
4. Carter, Dylan JR Southern Cali: 41.76
5. Ringgold, Brett JR Texas: 41.77
6. Condorelli, Santo JR Southern Cali: 41.77
7. Perry, Sam JR Stanford: 41.77
8. Pieroni, Blake JR Indiana: 41.85

Since Dressel’s time clearly outclasses his fellow swimmers in yards does the same hold true for meters?

From SwimSwam’s own time converter, a 40.00 SCY 100 freestyle converts to a 46.00 LCM 100 freestyle! 40.00 is pretty fast, but almost a full second under Cesar Cielo’s current (shiny-suited) world record of 46.91 seems a bit much.

We aren’t alone having issues converting Dressel 100 free. Team Unify’s own time converter also puts Dressel at a 46.00 LCM 100 freestyle.

Swimming world’s time converter does even worse. A 40.00 SCY 100 freestyle converts to: 45.81 – LCM and 44.43 – SCM! For comparison, here are the times from the final of last year’s Olympic men’s 100 meter freestyle:

1. Kyle Chalmers AUS 47.58
2. Pieter Timmers BEL 47.80
3. Nathan Adrian USA 47.85
4. Santo Condorelli CAN 47.88
5. Duncan Scott GBR 48.01
6. Caeleb Dressel USA 48.02
7. Cameron McEvoy AUS 48.12
8. Marcelo Chierighini BRA 48.41

While Caeleb was quite fast, clearly he did not win by over a second and while it looks like he will improve, it seems unlikely he will do so in the near future. So is Caleb Dressel just that much better at short course, or is there another reason why time converters just flail when looking at times as fast as Dressel’s 100 freestyle?

Time conversions between different swimming courses are usually based on two different techniques. One is to look at cut times (e.g. USA swimming’s A, AA standards), find the percentage differences between various courses, and extrapolate. This works quite well for most times, but tends to break down for very fast or slow times.

Another method is to, look at the top swimmers in each event, and compare their top yards and meters times in each event. This technique works better for very fast times such as Dressel’s but has a very different downside. The problem here is that many more of the top swimmers concentrate on LCM races. Most will also seriously race SCM events as well, but with the USA basically the only country left swimming yards, far fewer will race SCY races. Hence, the top level SCY times done will probably be comparatively slower than the top SCM or LCM times since fewer top swimmers are competing SCY.

To be clear, SwimSwam’s time converter is quite accurate when it comes to other elite swimmers. It performs well when looking at the best times of Missy Franklin, Tyler Clary, or Michael Phelps, all of who posted incredible times both SCY and LCM. Dressel’s 100 freestyle, not so much.

Without knowing exactly why Dressel’s 100 free was such as issue for the time converters, I wanted to try a different method. What if instead, I converted a time based off of the percentile rank, so I would assume that a 50th percentile 100 freestyler SCY would also be a 50th percentile 100 freestyler LCM? To be exact, for 20 year-olds in the USA, a 47.08 is a perfectly average (50th percentile) 100 freestyle time SCY for division 1 swimmers, and a 54.80 is an perfectly average LCM 100 yard freestyle time. Of course this method has other issues, but with enough times, it should hopefully perform a bit better at the extremes.

Using this technique, a 40.00 SCY 100 freestyle is in about the top 0.01th percentile and converts to a 46.94 LCM. Can Caeleb Dressel go a 46.94? Maybe!? But I’m excited to keep watching him to find out.