What Does the Data Show About World Championship Medalists Trained by the NCAA?

Two of the loudest explanations for the U.S. decline in performance on the international stage over the last three years (2023 Worlds, 2024 Olympics, 2025 Worlds) have been contradictory ideas.

On the one hand, the claim has been that with more swimmers coming to the NCAA, the rest of the world is benefitting from American coaching and closing the gap.

On the other hand, the claim has been that the United States focuses too much on yards swimming via high school and NCAA competition, and that hurts American swimmers in the 50 meter pool in the biggest international competitions*.

*Which begs the question why we don’t send our best short course swimmers to the short course World Championships, but I digress.

These ideas are contradictory because if international athletes are coming to the U.S. and training with American athletes in the yards-focused NCAA, wouldn’t they have the same challenges?

At any rate, while international swimmers are certainly benefitting from training in the United States, I don’t buy this as a crux of the issue of Team USA’s performances.

• International swimmers training in the United States had nothing to do with the Americans’ ability to put up a 52-second backstroker at the 2025 World Championships.
• International swimmers have always trained in the United States.
• The four countries catching us most quickly have the most-developed domestic programs and are the least-likely to send their athletes to the United States, in some cases even penalizing and shunning ones that do (China, Great Britain, Italy, Australia, and to a lesser degree Russia)

I wanted to look and see just how many of these American-trained/international swimmers are beating American-trained/American swimmers.

Aside: the medals table is not the end of the story for results at a major meet, but it is the most-digestible piece of data. Because digging through top 8s would take a full week (maybe I’ll do it when things quiet down), I focused my counts on medals.

Here are some bites of data that I found (please, check my math, it was a lot of hand counting, and it’s entirely possible I missed an international with NCAA roots):

• On the men’s side,  six non-American individual medalists have spent any significant time training in the United States.
  • Hubert Kos, Leon Marchand, Denis Petrashov, Caspar Corbeau, Ilya Kharun, and Krysztof Chmielewski combined for 3 gold, 3 silver, and 4 bronze medals.
  • That accounts for 10 out of 51 medals awarded, or 10 out of 45 medals awarded to non-Americans
  • Two of those six, Caspar Corbeau and Ilya Kharun, were raised fully in America and are American citizens.
  • Petrashov’s coach Arthur Albiero at Louisville is a Brazilian by birth, though he is now a U.S. citizen. Corbeau has done most of his training the last few years outside of the U.S.
• The relays tell an even bigger story. Out of 38 non-Americans who won men’s relay medals (prelims or finals), only 4 have spent any significant time training in the U.S. That includes just 1 out of the 16 swimmers who combined to block the U.S. out of the podium in the 800 free relay for the first time since 1998.
  • Leon Marchand (silver in the 400 medley), Andrei Minakov (gold in the 400 medley), and Charlie Hawke (silver in the 800 free relay) all trained in the NCAA. Hawke now trains back home in Australia, Marchand spent most of his time since the Olympics training in France and Australia, and Minakov has arguably gotten worse in his time training in the U.S., though he did have a good relay split.
• Only 2 of the non-American individual medalists on the women’s side have spent any significant time training in the United States.
  • Germany’s Anna Elendt, the 100 breaststroke gold medalist, spent four years training at Texas.
  • Canadian Summer McIntosh, the best swimmer at the meet, spent most of the two years leading up to Paris training full-time in Florida with the Sarasota Sharks (a USA Swimming club, but not an NCAA program). Most of her 2025 prep, however, was done in France with Fred Vergnoux and French club CN Antibes. She won 4 individual gold medals and 1 bronze.
  • Those two account for 6 out of 52 individual medals at the meet, or 6 out of 35 non-American individual medals. If we limit “trained in America” to “trained in the NCAA,” that falls to 1 out of 35.
  • Those two account for 2 out of 24 non-American individual medalists at the meet.
• Of the 37 non-American women who won relay medals, one trained in the United States for any significant period of time. Abbey Webb, a prelims leg on the Australian 400 free relay, trained at Auburn and NC State, finishing her eligibility in 2023 and graduating in December 2024.

All of that data begins to tell a story that doesn’t quite line up with “America is training all of the medalists.”

But I wanted to find the prologue, so I rewound to 2013 – a meet that was about a decade ago, in a post-Olympic year, but a meet that the U.S. dominated thoroughly: the Americans won 13 gold medals and 29 total medals. The next-best countries were China with 5 gold medals and Australia with 13 total medals.

At that meet, seven individual male medalists had trained in the United States for a significant period (in the NCAA or not), including the entire podium in the men’s 50 free. That’s one more.

The list I found: George Bovell, Vlad Morozov, Cesar Cielo, Yannick Agnel, Cameron van der Burgh, Wu Peng, and Thiago Pereira, though Agnel was a relatively-recent Bob Bowman addition at the time. Pereira, Wu, and Agnel of that group were not training with NCAA programs.

On the women’s side, I found four individual medalists who had trained in the U.S. for significant time.

The list I found: Melani Costa-Schmid, Lauren Boyle, Katinka Hosszu, and Yulia Efimova

The big flashing light here is that the world’s two best swimmers, Leon Marchand and Summer McIntosh, have spent a lot of time training in the United States. This is true, and it’s uncomfortable for Americans, because it has been a long time since neither of those mantles belonged to the United States.

But I think that’s a bit of a red herring relative to what’s going on with Team USA. All of this is small sample sizes, but the results of that limited sampling doesn’t really encourage much of a deeper dive.

What the data shows is that pretending as if the United States is the only place on earth that is training the world’s best swimmers is wholly disrespectful to what’s happening in the countries mentioned above. The United States’ depth is certainly still the overwhelming global force, but other countries are creating success domestically. Even France, where Marchand comes from, is proving that with double gold medalist Maxime Grousset and double bronze medalist Yohann Ndoye-Brouard, who are both trained domestically.

France, by the way, also trained Tunisia’s Ahmed Jaouadi, who won both the 800 and 1500 freestyles.

There are problems with swimming in the United States right now. A mountain of problems. There is no one big beautiful program that can address them all, but as the new CEO, in consultation with the new National Team staff, begin to peel the layers away to get at the root causes, I think it’s important to focus on the ones that matter.