Is Swimming A Bad Product? Reddit Users Seem To Think So (Plus, My Response)

From a former collegiate swimmer and life long lover of the sport, there’s a really simple reason swimming doesn’t take off outside the Olympics: It’s boring, like painfully boring to watch.

Races that are “exciting” to watch are short (~25 seconds-1 minute). The longer events are typically not “races” in the sense that after the first few laps the outcome is generally decided (think Ledecky winning when no one else was on the screen). To the swimming fan, these races are exciting but to the average person, these results are boring and generally can’t hold their interest.

Hell this past summer I found myself fast forwarding through all the broadcasts to get to the actual races. There is a lot of filler in swimming as only 8 people can race at a time.

Now for dual meets things can get exciting for closely matched teams and rivals. But apart from a swimmer having a lifetime swim, you can generally score out how a dual meet will go and be accurate within a few points. How? Just by looking at the times of swimmers. Once you get to a certain level, swimmers are predictable and times are objective, unlike gymnastics. My college coach did this and would regularly predict the outcome of meets. He would then tell us who we would be swimming from the other team. If the meet would be close he’d let us know the close races that would flip the score. A few times we would dominate and he would say “I should give their coach my sheet and say ‘this is how you should have put the team together today.”

My point is that to make swimming “watchable” for the masses, a lot needs to change. The Trials atmosphere is a great start but how can that be expanded to a regular TV broadcast? I think there’s certain opportunities in the TikTok era to make it more fun. A Manning-cast for swimming would be cool. USA Swimming probably needs to up their social media game and bring in more mainstream celebrities.

Personally, I think as NIL takes shape and more money is pushed to revenue generating sports and the international community commits to sending their swimmers to US colleges that the US will fall back on the international stage. That would make everything I said above more difficult.

u/JadedMuse compared swimming’s product to other performance-based Olympic sports like gymnastics and figure skating:

In other words, people found swim meets unappealing because of all the “extra stuff” involved in prelims/finals-based meets — very little time is dedicated to the actual finals races that matter, which often just last a few minutes amongst hours of other bureaucratic processes like heats, walkouts, award ceremonies, etc. Meanwhile, dual meets are often lopsided and predictable.

I don’t necessarily agree with the idea that high-level swimming is entirely predictable. While we get a general sense of who is favored in an event based on times, upsets still occur very often, especially with a swimmer’s form varying throughout the year. However, I can see how a sport where everyone seemingly does the same thing is more predictable than other non time-based sports, where there are more variables involved.

It seems like everyone is doing the same thing in swimming because it’s very hard to pick up on a swimmer’s technique unless you’re extremely well versed in the sport. An average viewer can watch twenty minutes of figure skating to discover that Ilia Malinin is known for his quadruple axel move, but they wouldn’t know what a “two-beat kick” is from watching a swimming race at the Olympics. This puts swimmers in a tricky position, given so many athletes in other sports base much of their identities off of their technique.

What’s interesting is that many people brought up Katie Ledecky‘s dominance in distance event as an example of why swimming is a poor product, as it’s not interesting for the casual to watch someone swim back and forth for over 15 minutes. Meanwhile, the images of Ledecky being the only swimmer in the frame while dominating a 1500 free remain some of the most notable images in swimming, at least in the United States. Ledecky’s popularity might just be due to patriotism and the fact that America likes to celebrate its own greatness, regardless of how “boring” the greatness can be. However, it’s an juxtaposition to think about.

Generating Excitement

Many users think that in order for swimming to a be better product for the masses, it must change from its status quo. u/Whaty0urname suggested tweaks in how the sport is broadcaster and marketed on social media. Meanwhile, u/MysticPlato thinks that unconventional competition formats like ISL and Duel in the Pool could make the sport more exciting:

If you’re trying to sell swimming as a watchable sport, you have to make the format interesting to the viewer. Dual/tri/quad meets are the best way to do this because you get head to head competition. The ISL did a lot of things right towards making swimming fun to watch. Too bad it was awfully managed and currently stuck in lawsuit hell. I hope someday the league can be salvaged.

Something like Dual in the Pool is also great. Put a series of 3-4 of those meets a year and you could have something really special. USA-AUS would draw a LOT of eyes. They’ve done USA vs Euro All-stars before too. Make the meet SCM, keep the individual races 200m and under, but offer the 200 and 400 relays.

A lot of it starts locally too. Meet directors need to feel free to do stuff that’s DIFFERENT. I coached club for 10 years, and every single LSC local meet was the exact same boring-ass format, with the exact same events every time. Doing something like the skins for the 50 free is a great way to make your meet 10x more exciting. Make your 200s 150s, make your 100s 75s, make your 50s 25s, do weird stuff. It doesn’t have to be EVERY time. But variety is the spice of life.

More than one person (including u/kagzig, a non-swimmer who only follows swimming during the Olympics) brought up that the atmosphere at the U.S. Olympic trials, which took place at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianpolis, was a step in the right direction.

As a non-swimmer who only watches swimming during the Olympics, the Trials were super fun this year. The organizers, broadcasters, etc did a good job of communicating how competitive the trials are and positioning the US trials as one of the most competitive meets in the world and qualifying as an achievement in itself. I watched more of that meet than I ever have before and look forward to it next cycle.

I’m not sure if it’s possible to replicate the hype of the US Trials in the absence of the Olympic cycle – people were excited for the Games and the trials benefited from that, several “big names” were circulating again via advertising in the run up to the Games and this was an extra opportunity to watch them, plus beyond the win/loss component there’s the highly compelling stakes of “making it” on the Olympic team.

I’d love to be proven wrong – it would be cool to have a major swim meet like the trials on a more regular basis, and maybe it can be pulled off in the way the Kentucky Derby gets viewership from people who never otherwise care about horse racing.

As someone who was at trials in-person last summer, I agree. Indianapolis is great at engraining sports into the livelihood of its city, and when trials was going on, the entirety of Georgia street turned into a swimming hub that was alive until the late hours of night. It was also marketed super well to an outside audience, who ate the “attendance record” stats up. I do with they could have done more when Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever came to watch the meet — I didn’t go a single day without seeing someone in a Clark jersey, so it would have been cool to tie the two current sports commodities of the city together.

That being said, it’s pretty hard to replicate the stakes and intensity of trials at a non-trials meet. However, USA Swimming made sure to make trials a spectacle rather than just your regular old meet, and more meets should take note.

Culture

One of the lines that struck me most was from u/LastMongoose7448, who says they are a lifelong swimmer. They say that “your entire career you’re told you’re racing the clock, not the others in the pool” — which to me, is representative of the general cookie-cutter sentiment in swimming that all you have to do succeed is work hard and be humble. And while that’s a great mantra to follow in life, it’s not what attracts viewers. To get people to care, you must think outside the box.

Several users had concerns about whether America’s top swimmers added energy to the sport outside the pool, with u/MysticPlato suggesting that swimming needed more personalities like Gary Hall Jr. and Lily King. Now, I’ve got a few cents on that.

First off, the negative traction that King sometimes gets from this website seems to indicate that maybe swimming isn’t ready for a personality like hers. Second off, I hate this notion that one has to be super extroverted or controversial to be “marketable.” I’m not saying that’s what others are implying, but extroversion isn’t what draws fans — it’s authenticity. Caeleb Dressel isn’t the most extroverted person, but he has a very clear identity outside of swimming. Kate Douglass has a rather subdued personality when she talks to media, but her TikToks alongside Regan Smith provide unique insight into their lives and friendship that make people want to latch on.

During the Olympics, I tried to tell stories of swimmers that would provide context to who they are outside of their results. If we continue that as media, we may find out that swimmers’ personalities are not as boring as we think they are.

u/LastMongoose7448 also mentioned that “swim coaches at top collegiate and international levels aren’t coaches, they’re facilitators. There’s no strategy, no film review, no adjustments. It’s just ‘how do I write this 10,000 yd/m workout so that it’s not a repeat of the one we did last week.'” This seems to add on to the sentiment that it’s very hard for the casual fan to discern technique changes. In response to this comment, individuals praised University of Virginia head coach Todd DeSorbo for using “science” in his training — the work that UVA math professor Ken Ono does with Virginia was one of the bigger stories circulating in the leadup to Paris.

I will say, swimming for the most part has moved away from the “let’s swim 10k a day for six months, taper for one big meet a year, and then rinse and repeat” type of mindset. Coaches like DeSorbo and Herbie Behm who have “newer” training philosophies certainly played a part in this change, which is why we are seeing more in-season excitement over performances than we’ve seen in the past.

There was also this interesting comment u/sparklinglies about how Australian swimming culture is more pervasive than American swimming culture:

I mean to be fair to the Americans, its not like they’ve gotten worse. Australia’s just always been on their ass because we have a nation wide swimming culture and they don’t, which makes it easier and cheaper for us to catch up. They pour a lot of time and resources into training high level swimmers in a country that doesn’t really support the discipline at anything other than the most elite level, which is hard to do.

We don’t have the numbers or the money but we have the culture for it. 90% of Australians live on or near the coast, we start learning to swim as toddlers, swim lessons are compulsory curicculum in most schools, 14% of the country own their own pool (compared to only 8% in the US), and there’s public leisure centers and pools all over the place. There’s a civilian level of comfort in swimming that I just don’t see in the US, which fosters a high number of elite swimmers in a very natural way.

Conclusion

So, why am I sharing this? This isn’t meant to be some AI-fueled clickbait piece that reports on fan-made social media posts and treats it like actual news. But this Reddit post shared insight about a topic where discussions have gotten very circular over the years, in a community where we wouldn’t *always* go to for swimming-specific discussion. I thought a lot of the comments were worth thinking about, and could prompt more nuanced responses (like what I had). And don’t get me wrong, there are many things about swimming that I like as it is — I’m someone who never participated in the sport but decided to write about it. But the state of the sport is becoming more and more volatile as months pass, and conversations about potential solutions need to be louder.