SwimSwam’s Predicted World Championship Medal Table Based On Our Previews

2022 FINA WORLD AQUATICS CHAMPIONSHIPS

• June 18-25, 2022 (pool swimming)
• Budapest, Hungary
• Duna Arena
• LCM (50-meter format)
• Meet Central
• Preview Index
• Full Aquatics Schedule
• How To Watch
• Psych Sheets
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• Official SwimSwam Pick’em Contest

In the weeks leading up to the 2022 World Championships, which are now just hours away, we’ve been providing in-depth event-by-event previews, predicting which swimmers and nations will reach the podium in Budapest.

See all of our previews here.

Now that it’s just about time for the swimmers to take to the blocks, here’s how our projected medal table looks based on the previews:

PROJECTED MEDAL TABLE

Note: Pool swimming only

*After a preview was published we learned Ahmed Hafnaoui would not be competing in Budapest.

To no one’s surprise, the United States comes out on top with a bullet, earning nearly half (20 out of 42) of the gold medals and 44 total.

Australia, facing a few key absences at the competition, comes out with six gold, 17 total medals, while China emerges third on the medal table while Italy and Canada are tied for the third-most medals with nine (table ranks countries based on gold medals).

How do these standings compare to past competitions?

Before diving into that, we first need to acknowledge how some of those missing swimmers eluded to above impacts things. Australia is missing Ariarne Titmus and Emma McKeon, who combined for six individual medals in Tokyo, and Great Britain is without Adam Peaty and Duncan Scott, who were in the hunt for five individual golds combined in Budapest.

In addition to the individual medals, all four of those swimmers being absent leaves a hole their country needs to fill on relays, particularly so for Great Britain.

On top of that, the entire Russian contingent isn’t competing. At the 2019 Worlds, Russia put up 16 medals, the third-most of any nation. At last year’s Olympics, which has seven fewer events than Worlds, the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) only won five medals, however.

2019 World Championship Medal Table (Pool Swimming)

Clearly, the U.S. comes out with a significantly higher number of medals in our 2022 projections than what actually happened in 2019.

But it’s actually pretty close to 2017, where the U.S. picked up 18 gold medals and 38 overall.

In Tokyo, the Americans actually won more medals (30) than they did in Gwangju despite there being seven fewer medal events.

Tokyo 2020 Medal Table (Pool Swimming)

The U.S. won 11 gold medals in 35 events at the Olympics (31.4%), and we project them to win 20 of 44 in Budapest (45.5%).

If we take remove Russia, Titmus, and South Africa’s Tatjana Schoenmaker from the Olympic results, the Americans would get bumped up to 15 gold medals, winning roughly 42.9 percent of the events. That falls much closer in line with our projected medal table.

So does SwimSwam have a bit of an American bias? Perhaps. But maybe not as much as it might look like sometimes.

We’ve gone heavy on some of the best swimmers of this era in the U.S., with Caeleb Dressel, Katie Ledecky and Lilly King combining for 10 individual gold medals. With Russia out, we’ve also predicted the U.S. men to sweep the backstrokes, which is hard to argue against.

Given Australia’s missing pieces, we project them to do reasonably well, and we’re also predicting Germany’s distance freestylers to carry them to the top end of the medal table.

Overall, 12 different nations were picked to win at least one gold. Gwangju also had 12, and Tokyo had 10.