After 11 matches during the regular season, the 2021 International Swimming League (ISL) playoffs kicked off last Thursday in Eindhoven, Netherlands.
In the first two playoffs matches, we saw some very fast performances, as well as many multiple winners. In fact, seven swimmers won four events each – Beata Nelson, Lilly King, Sarah Sjostrom, Siobhan Haughey, Emma McKeon, Ilya Shymanovich and Kyle Chalmers.
And some of them are among the top winners in the history of the ISL since the first edition in 2021. Swimming Stats’ Instagram page has published the top 10 list after the playoffs’ matches 1 and 2.
View this post on Instagram
Caeleb Dressel, the reigning ISL Season MVP and the top scorer (points-per-match) in the 2021 regular season, has won 61 events since 2019. His most prolific season was 2020 when we won 29 events.
In 2021, he missed one match during the regular season and also the first playoffs match. It gave some swimmers the opportunity to come close to him.
In fact, after winning four events in Eindhoven, Lilly King and Sarah Sjostrom completed 60 wins each, and now they are just one win behind Dressel. Sjostrom is the top winner of the 2021 season with 19 wins. She is followed by King, Kelsi Dahlia and Ilya Shymanovich with 18.
Having touched first in 18 races during this season, Dahlia has won 54.5% of all her ISL career wins only in 2021, the highest percentage among the top 10 winners.
Interestingly, Dressel, King and Sjostrom were the top 3 winners in 2019 and in 2020.
Speaking of individual events only, we also have the same swimmers in the top 3. Dressel has won 49 races, and he is followed by King (45) and Sjostrom (39).
Beryl Gastaldello comes next with 28 wins, which means she has won only 4 relay races — she has 87.5% of all her ISL career wins in individual events, the highest percentage among the top 10 winners.
Winningest, one of the worst grammatical errors witnessed to date
Meriam-Webster does not agree.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/winningest
The beauty of the English language, as compared to, say, the French language or many other world languages, is that it is an open source language. It’s a language based heavily on “have the communicator and communicatee accurately understood each other.” The language evolves and changes, new vocabulary pops up like crazy, grammar changes, etc. It is a language well structured to receive words from other places, to receive new words, to create new words that are easily understood by large groups of people.
There is no Academie Francaise that exists to retain rigid rules upon the language.
Bling bling
blang blang
blung blung, we’re done
Q: As a language based heavily on “have the communicator and communicatee accurately understood each other.” …….or put more simply ‘shared meaning’. But some neologisms are mighty ugly 🙂
Not only is “winningest” a word, but you’ve made two significant errors here. First, even if you were correct it would not be an error of grammar but of vocabulary. Second, the structure of your sentence calls for a colon rather than a comma. As in, you know, an actual grammatical error.
Ultimately, though, neither of those points matter because your meaning was perfectly clear, and it’s simply petty pedantry for me to point it out like this. Petty pedantry, of course, being a motivation you’re clearly very familiar with.
Comment section is getting spicy now
If you sweep a skins match, is that 3 wins?
Yes it must be. I don’t know if Dahlia has even competed in 18 events outside of skins, let alone won that many.
This is a cool list, if u had a top ten list for best in the league currently it’d still look identical to this
Without gastadello lol obviously