Another year has come and gone, and another year of conversations have happened.
The conversation of swimming continues to be where the sport grows and thrives, for coaches, athletes, and fans. That conversation produces the true engagement that brings us all deeper into the sport, helps us all learn, and enrichens our passions for swimming.
In 2022, there was a lot of passion about a lot of topics. As is the norm, most of the most-commented articles were live recaps, but a few news articles snuck in to the top 50 as well. That includes the original article discussing accusations of verbal abuse against Cal women’s head coach Teri McKeever, the mysterious withdrawal of Caeleb Dressel from the World Championships midway through the meet, and Regan Smith‘s high-profile decision to switch coaches from Greg Meehan and Stanford to Bob Bowman and the Arizona State pro group.
By the way, because it gets asked every year: the most-commented articles in the history of SwimSwam continue to be the Olympic recaps. Day 5 finals from Tokyo received 2002 comments. Only one non-recap cracks the top 50 of all-time: a story about Michael Andrew’s decision to not receive the COVID-19 vaccine. That one got 776 comments, at least.
Most-Commented Articles of 2022
Keep in mind that these counts only include those comments that were not removed for violating SwimSwam’s comment policies. In some cases, the number of comments removed are substantial.
Happy New Year to the SwimSwam team and the SwimSwamers.
May that year of swimming brings you emotions, joy and happiness.
Imagine the number of comments after the announcement of Michael Andrew training now with Bob Bowman! 😆
No more piano to close his 200 IM!
We’d have to buy a new server lol.
What would be the non recap stories rankings I wonder?
Prelims fared better than I expected
I agree – especially given time zones (about half our audience is American during a World Championship meet, and prelims were at an untenable hour here). Good time zone for Italy, UK, and Australia, our next three most popular countries, though.
Do you have a break down of the audience Braden that you’d be happy to share? You know we love a good stat here
from her recent meet performance and the smile on her face, it seems regan smith definitely made the right decision for her!
just don’t tell me how many of those comments were me
You’ve left about 5,600 comments all-time.
Here was the first: https://swimswam.com/lochte-tops-400-im-phelps-misses-podium-altogether/#comment-18009
A decade of Steve Nolan <3<3<3
Feel like we need legit SwimSwam accounts so we can finally see who the truly most prolific commenters are
I’m sure I was in the top 3 of the most profilic commenters during the 2010-2020 decade. 🙂
But I have much less time since then and now I go to SwimSwam almost exclusively to read and stay informed.
I miss your comments!
Some old names there. Hope my boy RJ Cid is doing alright.
WAIT DID YOU GET THOSE BACK!? (Because I nuked ’em all accidentally…last summer?)
Now if I only tell you what my username was BEFORE it was just my name.
Really is a decade+, damn
Y’ALL ARE MY BEST FRIENDS.
Oh hmmmmm! You can only nuke by email address not username, and you were using a different email address at the time. So maybe there were actually more.
Continuing to shine the spotlight on coaching/swimmer misconduct and creating a safe environment won’t ever get the numbers, but this is so key to the sport and its future!
Yes, like the cheating Vice President Zhou Jihong
Everyone knows that even though a certain Games may not have had the most comments, they definitely had the best comments
Good one