Is the US Really Losing Ground to the Rest of the World?

Tonight, as I watched the Discovery Channel premier of the controversial new show Curiosity, I heard a great quote during, of all things, a University of Phoneix commercial. It went something to the effect of “to be an expert, you don’t have to know everything. You just have to have the curiosity to try and find it out.” With that thought still fresh in my mind, I went over to the Swim Brief and read Chris Desantis’ post title “Keep it in Perspective” about the world catching up to the Americans in swimming. Chris correctly points out that there’s still no other team in the world that even come closes to the level of the Americans. The USA had more than twice as many medals as any other country in the meet (including China), which is mostly a function of our large population and our relatively enormous swimming infrastructure.

But Chris posits that the USA is not keeping up with their historical, and in my curiosity, I wanted to look at the numbers and see if this was really true. There are many different ways to look at the problem, statistically. I picked the three that I thought were the best explanations for the perceived slide in American swimming. In general, the answer is “yes, the United States is not as dominant in swimming as it once was,” however the amounts of our backslide are of very low significance, and not nearly at the rate by which some might believe.

The numbers below were all based on the 14 long course World Championships results, as the 2011 World Championships were the most recent comparable event.

First, here’s the basic math:
USA Swimming medals at the 2011 WC’s: 29/120 = 24.16%
USA Swimming medals all-time at the WC’s: 361/1338 = 26.98%
Comparative difference in number of medals between 2011 and all-time percentage: -3.3 medals

Olympic Focus

USA Swimming has made no bones about it: from the fans, to the coaches, to the administration, they just don’t care about the non-50 Olympic events. Way back in the infancy of my swim-blogging days, I wrote a thesis about this idea, but it’s no secret that the Americans would gladly trade four 50 meter gold medals for even one in a 100 or 200 meter race. The Americans have devised their full-training on the Olympics, and because these 50m races aren’t on the Olympic schedule they’re not encouraged nor incentivized by the multitude of USA Swimming funding programs. In other countries, they are. Spain’s Rafael Munoz, Great Britain’s Liam Tancock, and Sweden’s Therese Alshammar have made a living off of 50m races.

If you take out the non-Olympic 50m races, the gap closes considerably.

(In reality, the 50 free should almost be removed as well, because in the modern era it is heavily tied to the other 50m sprints: 2011’s top-ranked 50m freestylers are the same as the 50m butterfliers in both the men’s and women’s rankings, but for the sake of argument, we’ll leave the 50 free in.)

The numbers now change to:
USA Swimming medals at the 2011 WC’s without 50’s: 26/102 = 25.49%
USA Swimming medals all-time without 50’s: 342/1230 = 27.80%
Comparative difference in number of medals between 2011 and all-time percentage: -2.3 medals

The China Effect

Perhaps it’s not the world catching up to the Americans, perhaps it’s the Chinese and their 1.3 billion citizens catching up to the world, just like they are in everything else. The Chinese have invested a ton in their sporting infrastructure and it’s showing in the medal counts. At these World Championships, the Chinese (swimming in front of a home-crowd and without having to deal with acclimating to the food, the weather, the timezones, or anything else) won 14 medals. That’s a near-record haul for them, excluding the steroid-tainted 1994 meet where their women won all but 4 of the races.

If you exclude the effect of the Chinese performance, it shows that it’s not the world catching up on the United States, it is in fact the Chinese improvements that are making all of the difference. If you buy that postulate, then the Americans are not doing anything wrong, it’s simply the inevitable nature of 1.3 billion people with a communist government that has shown it’s willing to sink the resources into a sports program will not be kept down for long (they never have been – the USSR and East Germany as an example, where sporting powerhouses).

The numbers if you pull out the improvements of the Chinese:
USA Swimming Medals at the 2011 WC’s without China: 29/106 = 27.36%
USA Swimming Medals All-Time at the WC’s without China: 361/1275 = 28.31%
Comparative Difference:  -1 medal

The Super 70’s

It was implausible to believe that the USA could keep up their dominance in our sport in the era pre-1980. The gap between funding in the USA for swimming and most other countries was huge. It was hard for many countries to even send their athletes to the World Championships, let alone properly train them. If we consider 1980-onward the modern era of the World’s commercialization of sports, and thus look at the numbers from only the 11 most-recent World Championships, then 2011 was a very average year.

The numbers if you pull out the 1970’s:
USA Swimming Medals At the 2011 WC’s: 29/120 = 24.16%
USA Swimming Medals Since 1980: 262/1077 = 24.32%
Comparative Difference: -.1 medals

And if you again pull out the 50m races from the equation, the Americans were above-average in meets since the 1980’s by about half-a-medal.

Poor Selection System

And with all of the above, we also have to consider the National Team selection procedure that was used for the meet, which new National Team Director Frank Busch said he would never use again. This likely cost the Americans at least two Missy Franklin medals (in the 100 and 200 free), and maybe a Matt Grevers medal. If you count three more medals for the Americans, then the 2011 World Championships actually became an arguably ABOVE-average meet for the Americans.

Scenarios like this are the danger of singling out one meet (or even two, or three) as a signal of a trend. A few tenths here or there, or extenuating circumstances as our sport becomes more and more intricate, can all of a sudden change the numbers drastically.

Conclusion

The numbers don’t lie. The World has made small-sale gains on the US in swimming over the past four decades, at least at the World Championship level. When you parse through the numbers, however, the improvements are by two-or-three medals over the course of the entire meet as compared to a four-decade average, and yet we’re still head-and-tails above the rest of the world. Furthermore, most of the differences can be easily explained away by either concious decisions to punt on certain events, or other factors that are outside of the sphere of control of USA Swimming (aka the rise of China).

The numbers seem to show that there’s no relationship between the world catching up to us and us training foreign athletes, as is the xenophobic rallying cry. The entire change in medal ratios can be accounted for by China’s improvement, and we only train one of their athletes in the United States.

The argument is sometimes made, especially as compared to some of the European countries, that the United States isn’t doing as well because countries with much smaller populations are winning a whole lot more medals per swimmer than we are, but the difference there can simply be accounted for by national strategies. The US sinks a whole lot more money into allowing hoards of swimmers to reach an elite level. If you compare the 20th swimmer at our junior championships to the 20th swimmer at any other countries’ junior championships, the differences are pretty shocking. Even compared to a country like Australia, which is usually very deep, it’s about a full-second difference between our 20th and their 20th in the 17-18 age group. The further down the rankings you go, the bigger the gap becomes.

A good analogy for Americans is Major League Baseball versus the NBA. In major league baseball, thousands of players are drafted into minor league systems every year, and those players either pan out or don’t. The NBA, however, chooses a select few prospects (maybe 70 a year, max) and sinks a whole lot of money into their development. The United States is baseball, and the rest of the world is the NBA. Our people prefer that we give every swimmer an opportunity to chase their Olympic dream rather than rule them out early. This lowers the percentage that pan out for championship medals, but it hasn’t yet significantly damaged our overall success.