Updating Relay Projections: British Men On the Move

Like we did earlier this week, let’s take a look at some updated relay placing projections based on how well each leg has swum so far here in Rio.

As we did before, let’s make a couple things clear about these projections:

• THESE ARE NOT FINAL TIME PROJECTIONS. These composite times are more focused on placing, comparing each team to the other teams in medal contention based on adding up the best times in each 100-meter stroke event.
• THESE TIMES DO NOT FACTOR IN RELAY EXCHANGES. The breaststroke and butterfly legs in each composite time come from the best swim that nation has in the individual 100 breast or fly. A relay exchange would likely take around a half-second off that time, provided the swimmer swims the exact same race he/she did in the individual event.
• Some freestyle legs also don’t include relay starts. By and large, we used the top splits from the 4×100 free relays, which do include flying start boosts. But in some cases, the best leg of that relay was a leadoff. In those cases, we’ve marked the split with an asterisk (*).
• In two cases, we haven’t seen the likely swimmer swim that individual race in Rio. Sweden will probably use the versatile Michelle Coleman as their backstroker, but she has only swum freestyle in Rio. We used her season-best and marked it with italics. France didn’t enter a male breaststroker at Rio, so we used their season-best from Theo Bussiere.

We’ve still got the men’s 100 fly final coming up, which could tweak these projections before the medley relay final. In the 100 free, we didn’t use any individual flat-start times unless they actually beat that nation’s best relay split (even if the flat-start time would likely be faster with a relay exchange), so that’s another area with some wiggle room – most notably for the American women, where Simone Manuel‘s 52.70 flat start would project a lot faster than Abbey Weitzeil‘s relay split.

Women’s Projections

Top Three:

Others:

Men’s Projections

Top Three:

Others:

What it means

The United States still looks like the favorites in both relays, and that’s even without Michael Phelps showing his whole hand in the 100 fly as of yet. If his past swims in Rio (particularly his other relay legs) are any indicator, Phelps has a real chance to put the race out of range by the end of his leg.

Australia has struggled, but still have big-time talent, especially on back and free. David Morgan is done in the 100 fly, so their individual times won’t change any by the relay. They’ll also have an interesting anchor choice: do you use Cameron McEvoy, who rattled the world record and still leads the world ranks, plus split 47.00 on the 4×100 free relay? Or do you swap for Olympic champ Kyle Chalmers, a younger and perhaps more risky gamble, but one who is red-hot and doing his best swimming right now?

The British men have made big strides, with James Guy and Duncan Scott both swimming much faster than Great Britain’s previous projections on the fly and free legs. They’re still weak in backstroke, but a game-changing breaststroke leg from Adam Peaty could have the Brits knocking off Australia for silver – that is, if Scott can hold off whoever the Aussies anchor with.

Not much change in the contenders for the women, but the intrigue comes in the anchor legs. Conventional wisdom would say Cate Campbell could be much faster than 51.8 for Australia after going 52.0 from a flat start last month. But she was upset for the gold last night by American Simone Manuel (and Canadian Penny Oleksiak, who will more likely swim fly on this relay).

Manuel’s 52.70 swim suggests she could perform better than the split projected here – a 52.56 from Abbey Weitzeil on the 4×100 free relay – and Manuel’s individual gold medal probably earns her the finals spot.

Oleksiak and Canada are on fire, and seem like great bets for the bronze medal, sitting almost a second up on China right now.