Believe it or not folks, I am huge fan of the sport of swimming. Cue a few of my hate readers that think all I do is pull all-nighters thinking of complaints to make. Dating back to the 1990s, I’ve been dutifully following swimming results live as they happen on the internet.
So it is perplexing to me that in the past couple of years, that experience (for major US meets) has gotten considerably worse. One would think that steady advances in technology would have resulted in huge improvements by this point. Instead, it is actually harder now than it was to follow meets some twenty years ago.
To wit- the US Open is happening at my old haunt Georgia Tech this weekend. I tried to get on USA Swimming’s website to watch the live stream, and instead got this screen in never ending fashion:
Is there something I need to fix with my browser (Chrome, latest version)? Maybe, but even normally bad websites might actually indicate what this is. USA Swimming’s website just fails.
It wouldn’t be so bad if live results were easy to come by, but they’re not. In the past year (18 months?) Omega timing, USA Swimming’s official partner for these meets, has moved their live timing behind a paywall.
Go to Omega’s website and click on “live timing” and you will get directed to the following page:
Now, since the dawn of the internet, pages that required a login have featured some sort of way to funnel people who haven’t created an account to make one. Omega has no such functionality, leaving users to hunt on their own to even get something to enter on this page.
I can remember previously finding this, but no such luck on this attempt. I can recall the price being prohibitively steep- somewhere in the hundreds of dollars (whereas Omega used to provide this for free).
Alas, if I couldn’t actually follow the meet “live” then I could hope to follow it “semi-live” and check some PDF results as they came in. As of my typing this blog, at 11:53, I would hope that a few of this morning’s races are complete. In fact, they are but you can only see a fraction of the results via Swimswam’s live recap of the event.
Omega’s results page shows this:
I have at least a half-dozen teams with countless swimmers i’m interested in following at this meet. It appears, however, that unless I am in Atlanta it will be frustrating at best to follow this.
So what gives? Why does USA Swimming make the experience of following their top meets worse than an average age group meet in Denmark? The answer, unfortunately as always, is money.
I was accredited media at the 2008 Olympic Trials alongside Garrett McCaffrey. At that meet we were both representing floswimming, at that time a popular website that I still hear weekly is sorely missed. Covering that meet was the culmination of a year plus of trying to cover USA Swimming meets.
USA Swimming’s strategy since the Chuck Wielgus era (1998-2017) has been to try and attract sponsorship for the organization. That sponsorship in turn fuels outsized executive suite and employee compensation at the USA Swimming headquarters in Colorado Springs.
Now, a solid long term strategy would be to do as USA Swimming purports to do and “build the base” of the sport. Instead, USA Swimming extends a giant middle finger to its base, and instead consistently aims to please corporate sponsors (like Omega).
Even meets like the US Open, Junior Nationals and Olympic Trials are designed around corporate sponsorships in less direct ways.
The 2008 Olympic trials was the first “mega” trials meet. Whereas the 2004 Trials had about 500 swimmers, a steady growth from previous eras, 2008 ballooned to around 1200. USA Swimming could be forgiven that the meet was oversubscribed. After all, this was the “floaty suit” era.
Despite making for a worse experience for anyone actually trying to make our Olympic team, USA Swimming likely loved the huge meet. Beyond selling out the stands of a 14,000 seat arena in large part thanks to the parents and families of those athletes, there were even more benefits.
In 2010 Marriott became the official hotel sponsor of USA Swimming. One would reason that USA Swimming get’s money back from people booking Marriott hotel rooms for major swim meets. What better reason to have all major swim meets feature 1000 or even 2000 competitors. That’s a lot of hotel rooms!
Even better, USA Swimming figured out they could go back to having two junior national meets and still get 1000+ athletes to both venues. Cha-ching!
This is just one example, and to answer it I have a plea. As a fan of swimming, can we please make it easier to follow these meets? Can we believe it is actually possible to have fans without this kind of compulsory money grab? Pretty please?