SwimSwam Pulse: 63% Say Peak Sjostrom Would Win All-Time Skins Race

SwimSwam Pulse is a recurring feature tracking and analyzing the results of our periodic A3 Performance Polls. You can cast your vote in our newest poll on the SwimSwam homepage, about halfway down the page on the right side, or you can find the poll embedded at the bottom of this post.

Our most recent poll asked SwimSwam readers to pick between a hypothetical three-round skin race between

RESULTS

Question: Who would win in a hypothetical 50 free (SCM) skin race?

• Peak Sarah Sjostrom – 63.2%
• Peak Ranomi Kromowidjojo – 20.1%
• Peak Cate Campbell – 16.7%

Nearly two-thirds of voters picked Sjostrom to win a battle of the three fastest swimmers in history in the short course meter 50 free.

Sjostrom is #2 in history, with a lifetime-best of 23.00 from 2017. She has demonstrated her skins excellence plenty of times in her career, winning three 50 free skin races in four tries last year, along with two freestyle skin wins in three attempts this year. In terms of this poll, Sjostrom was probably helped by proximity, as she won two freestyle skin races during the week that this poll was running.

Despite Sjostrom’s obviously-impressive resume, there’s an argument to be made that Kromowidjojo is being underrated in this poll. Kromowidjojo is the world record-holder, going 22.93 on the same day that Sjostrom hit her career-best 23.00. Like Sjostrom, she’s won multiple ISL skin races. In fact, Kromowidjojo went a perfect 4-for-4 in the freestyle skins last year, and was the only swimmer in the entire league to beat Sjostrom head to head in a skin race, doing so in their only direct meeting at the Euro derby.

Kromowidjojo lost both 50 free skins to Sjostrom during the duration of this poll, though, which probably swayed votes quite a bit, despite Kromowidjojo’s peak arguably being higher than Sjostrom’s.

Campbell is the #3 all-time performer in the 50 free at 23.19. She had a run of dominance through 2017 and 2018, but wasn’t able to beat Kromowidjojo or Sjostrom head to head in a skins race last year. Campbell is not competing in the ISL this year, and her lack of recent race results to the scale of the other two swimmers probably hurt her standing.

Below, vote in our new A3 Performance Poll, which asks voters to weigh in on a controversial quirk of the new ISL skins format, in which the swimmer who wins the third and final round doesn’t always score the most points:

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ABOUT A3 PERFORMANCE

The A3 Performance Poll is courtesy of A3 Performance, a SwimSwam partner