2024 WORLD AQUATIC CHAMPIONSHIPS
- February 11th – February 18th
- Doha, Qatar
- LCM (50m)
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Pan Zhanle broke the Men’s 100m freestyle World Record in the opening leg of the 4×100 freestyle relay at the 2024 Doha World Championships. In a time of 46.80 he helped the Chinese team to win the first gold ever in the 4×100 relay and delete Popovici’s 46.86 from Rome 2022.
After the race, he made the following statements with the help of a translator from Chinese to English:
“I wasn’t looking for the record. It just happened; I was focused on myself and my performance. Actually, I’m not that eager to break the record, I know what I do in my daily training.
For me, the next goal is to swim fast, faster, and faster in case this record is broken in a few days; I want to keep it for the most time possible.
I don’t know how much faster I can go, because there’s no limit, we can do better than this time”.
The individual final of the 100 free men will take place on Thursday 15th
SPLIT COMPARISON:
| ZHANLE | POPOVICI | |
| First 50 | 22.26 | 22.74 |
| Second 50 | 24.54 | 24.12 |
| 46.8 | 46.86 |
ALL-TIME TOP PERFORMANCES, MEN’S 100 FREE:
- Pan Zhanle, China – 46.80 (2024)
- David Popovici, Romania — 46.86 (2022)
- Cesar Cielo, Brazil — 46.91 (2009)
- Alain Bernard, France — 46.94 (2009)
In a previous interview. Pan said the limit is 46.18 . Breaking the swim into start, turn and two mid way legs. He said he had room in start and turn of around .4/.2 and he has the fastest mid way already
I like his can do attitude.
The kind of attitude that helps you to achieve greatness.
There are limits though, just saying.
Shut up nerd
OK serious discussion there’s indeed a hard limit somewhere to human performance, but it’s really hard if not impossible to determine exactly where they are. I think athletics is a great example, many wrs are decades old, some set in the 80s, so you can make a good case that for example the men’s 100m sprint wr is probably pushing pretty close to what a human may theoretically even be capable of.
Honestly though I don’t think swimming is particularly close to those limits. The human body is not at all optimal hydrodynamically and we’re still learning so much, as the major time drops largely driven by technique over the last decade show.
So practically, there… Read more »
If you look at the diagram of progression of swimming world records, it has been pretty much flatlining in the last decade, so logically any drop to be expected has to be relatively insignificant.
But idk I might eat my words in a few days.
The “there is no limit” cliche just irks me because it’s objectively untrue. Nobody is gonna teleport.
It is a saying, and world records can be broken by very fractions over time so in that sense there is “no limit”. For eg you can break a record by 0.01 and if that happens every decade it will still be significant and prove your theory wrong. Unless you can give me a limit what you say can be essentially discarded.
If you were traveling at the speed of light it would take you approximately 3.34×10−7 seconds to swim a 100m freestyle. Since that’s impossible, that is the mathematical limit. What is the real limit? Well that depends on a plethora of factors, and it’s simply not possible to calculate. For example do we allow genetic engineering? Imagine in the future we grow humans with fins! That would be very weird but they would sure swim fast.
In the sense however that every swimmer will reach their limit at some point, and won’t be faster than a certain time in any given event, there are indeed still limits.
It’s just semantics at this point, and my problem was really only with the cliche. I’m obviously hyped for Pan as well.
Nope, a 0.01 drop is objectively insignificant, and there will come a time when even that won’t be happening anymore (just not in our lifetime, so in that sense, you are indeed right).
I actually do think we’re coming close to the point that swimming is gonna start to have WRs that aren’t broken and the men’s 200 free is a very close example of that
There’s no limit to this ratio
Yep, people didn’t like it xd.
Because I have too much spare time textile split comparison:
1) Pan 2024 ||||||| 46.80 22.26 24.54
2) Popovici 2022 46.86 22.74 24.12
3) Dressel 2019 | 46.96 22.29 24.67
4) Pan 2023 ||||||| 46.97 22.45 24.52
5) Popovici 2022 46.98 22.93 24.05
6) Dressel 2021 | 47.02 22.39 24.63
7) McEvoy 2016 47.04 22.54 24.50
8) Pan 2023 ||||||| 47.06 22.52 24.54
9) Popovici 2022 47.07 22.72 24.35
10) Chalmers 2019 47.08 22.79 24.29
10) Chalmers 2021 47.08 22.71 24.37
Popovici should train with MOC
Let me dream….Chalmers sits right between Pan and Pop.
He needs to get out in 22.5 and come back in 24.3 for a 46.8