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Tokyo Olympics: No Looking Ahead as History Written Over Eight Days
So much time in swimming is spent looking ahead. We watch performances and analyze them, figure out what they mean in the grand scheme of the sport. Was a swimmer fully rested and shaved at this meet or that meet? Who is trending upward, and who has been looking sluggish? Who has more in the tank?
After a series of domestic qualifying meets, we ask how those competitors will stack up on the international level. In college swimming, it’s about how the performances at the various conference championship meets will compare at the NCAA Championships, and after NCAAs, we ask how the standouts will transfer their skills to long course. Even after a World Championships, we can look ahead to how a swimmer might perform in a year or three years at the next Olympics.
Not this week. At the Olympics, absolutely nothing matters besides place. No one is looking ahead any further than Tokyo.
Get your hand on the wall first in a final, and you are an Olympic gold medalist. Touch second or third, and you’re an Olympic medalist. It does not matter if you set a world record last year, last month, last week or even in the semifinals. History best remembers the results at an Olympic Games.
That is not to say we should not respect the grind of the years in between Olympics, particularly when there was an extra year since Rio because of the pandemic delay. Every swimmer and every athlete across all sports should be proud of their efforts, and there is beauty in the chase of the Olympic dream, whatever the final outcome.
And to be fair, this won’t be the Olympics as we all know it. There are immense restrictions in place on the athletes, officials and media in attendance to combat the ongoing pandemic, and those regulations, while certainly necessary, will detract from the overall Olympic experience and dampen what should be a celebratory event.
Katie Ledecky — Photo Courtesy: Peter H. Bick
But despite all the restrictions, star American freestyler Katie Ledecky urged fans to try to see the charm of these Olympics. “The world is still coming together,” she said in a USA Swimming pre-meet press conference. “Athletes and coaches and volunteers, everyone is getting together in this one city to pursue their goals they’ve worked for the last five years. I think that’s a great thing. I know this is a made-for-TV Olympics, and I hope everyone around the world tunes in and recognizes the beauty of the work that all these athletes have put into in the last five years.”
And along those lines, swimming fans should appreciate the arrival of a swim meet with no future speculation, no “so-what?” baked into the very fabric of the event. This is it.
At the end of a 162-game Major League Baseball season, the best teams advance to the postseason and then compete in short series (best-of-seven, best-of-five and even a winner-take-all game) to determine who advances to the next round. The postseason is the sprint at the end of a marathon season, and oftentimes, the best team does not win the World Series. But during the postseason, every team tries to win every game by any means possible. No more worrying about pitchers’ innings limits or keeping regulars fresh. Just win.
At the Olympics, just win. Period. Past accomplishments and future prospects, whatever. Win, and that’s your legacy. Fairly or perhaps unfairly, the swimmers considered the best in history are the ones who come through during the week-long Olympics when the world tunes in to watch swimming. The best come to the Olympics with high expectations and match or exceed them, like Michael Phelps did for so many years.
Swimmers like Ledecky, Adam Peaty, Sarah Sjostrom and Katinka Hosszu cemented their places in history by coming through in the big moments in Rio, and another crop of athletes will do the same this week. Whether it’s the favorites we’ve grown accustomed to watching at World Championships and national-level meets or someone you have never heard of.
Remember Dmitry Balandin, the Kazakhstani swimmer with a single sixth-place finish at the World Championships on his résumé before he stunningly won Olympic gold in the 200 breast in 2016? Balandin would never again come close to matching that performance, but he is forever an Olympic champion.
For the favorites, they must perform at the Olympics to secure their spot as all-time greats. Even Caeleb Dressel, even after all the history he has made with by winning 15 medals (13 of them gold) in two World Championship appearances. The Olympics have been swimming’s prime time event for generations, and there is no sign of that changing anytime in the near future.
The meet circled on the calendar for so long, then delayed, is finally here. Swimming fans, enjoy this moment with the sport in the spotlight. For the first time since August 2016, there is no next meet up. It all comes down to Tokyo.
