It’s hard to pinpoint the moment where I finally realized that this wouldn’t be a normal Olympics for the USA. If I had to choose, it was during the Men’s 200 Fly. America had already only managed one semi-finalist, the 17 year old phenom Thomas Heilman. Heilman put in a valiant semi-final swim, but ultimately tied up on the final stretch. There would be no American finalist in the 200 fly.
It’s hard for me to imagine this circumstance. For most of my life, America has often had at least one gold medal contender, and quite often another medal threat. While Michael Phelps obviously had a long stretch of dominance in the event, there was Tom Malchow before him, and Mel Stewart before that. And along the way there were some spectacular “second bananas” in Tyler Clary, Ugur Taner.
Heilmann may yet be the next one, yet there is more to the story than just him being a bit too young to swim with the best at this Olympics. The usual progression for a US National team is to dominate the Olympics. In the interim, there may be a Worlds that doesn’t quite go our way, but the ship is always righted at the Olympics. In 2021, the most recent rendition, the US fended off probably the best Australian women’s team of all time to still dominate the medal table.
I feel confident at this point that 2024 will break that cycle. We shall see what the final results bear out, but in the meantime, the trend is not positive for the US competitively. As the night wore on, and the team was generally struggling to get swimmers into finals, I found myself pondering the simple question that anyone who cares will be asking for the next four years. Why?
In Switzerland they Call them CANtons
The following is purely my speculation about why the US has been such a dominant force in the sport of swimming. In order to understand why we have slowly become less so, I think the best place to start is to understand why we became so strong in the first place.
I believe that big organizations often do a poor job recognizing their own strengths. They often misunderstand what makes them good and assign credit where it is undue. Likewise, they are ignorant to where credit should come from.
Winning, and being successful, only deepens this ignorance. While times are good, nearly any internal process can be justified as “working” and decisions get made not necessarily on a proper evaluation but who within that organization can most effectively champion their own fiefdom.
The smaller the organization, the easier it can be to evaluate what’s working. There’s an agility that comes with minimal bureaucracy, an inevitable creativity that empowers people to try things that are yet untested, because who cares if it fails.
The peak of United States dominance in swimming came in 1976, when the US men turned in probably the most dominating effort in the history of sport. With a handful of exceptions, the Men swept (1-2-3, more on that in a moment) to victory. That victory was so dominant that in the interest of “fairness” countries from that point forward would only be allowed two entrants in Olympic swimming. We needed to give the rest of the world a chance.
It is no coincidence that there was no NGB specifically for swimming in 1976. The majority of amateur sports were run by the AAU, which has always been a vastly decentralized bureaucracy, mainly for organizing national level competition.
The Ted Stevens Amateur Sports Act effectively created the concept of the NGB in 1978, and USA Swimming would come into existence in 1980. Now before you read to much into this, I am not suggesting in any shape or form that we return to the AAU days, especially the stupid groundswell of greedy coaches who would love to profit mightily off AAU meets.
The Stevens act specifically created a mission for these NGBs: win medals. They had a clear mandate, their existence was built around Olympic medals. So it’s no surprise that USA swimming has typically been the “flagship” NGB. They consistently bring in the medals.
There is no problem with the concept of an NGB, in fact it is a better concept than the AAU. The fundamental error that has compounded over time (and that we are now paying debt on) was in how USA Swimming culturally perceived itself.
Because their existence was tied to medals, and because they won a lot of medals, they began to believe that their actions were creating the medal haul. This is provably false, again by the most dominant medal performance occuring before they existed, but memories and attention span for Olympic results are short, and the US sat out the 1980 games while then competing in 84 with one of their biggest competitors absent.
Once again, I’ve meandered setting up without getting to what I truly think about WHY the US is so dominant. The answer is simple. By the 1970s, a completely disorganized national network of clubs had formed in the US. They were, for the most part, smaller in size than many of today’s “mega clubs”. They had a volunteer army, mainly in the form of mom’s, to compliment a group of coaches who had more in common with your local model train collectors club than anything “professional”.
In this environment, it’s not so much what was consciously being done as what was not being done. There were less people trying to take credit for every talented athlete for personal gain. Coaches were less encumbered doing a myriad of tasks that contribute nothing to the experience or competitive success of athletes. There was more freedom to try, and fail. Summer leagues were founded and expanded, giving the sport a competitive base of millions.
Look at where we find ourselves in 2024 in American Swimming. USA Swimming has vastly expanded it’s bureaucracy, but to what end in terms of the experience of athletes or their competitive success? Swim clubs are bigger than ever, and more inefficient than ever. Is your average kid truly having a good experience on a club with 1000 swimmers? I doubt it.
The volunteer corp of the sport is completely exhausted. Their are less hands to do the same work, and what hands are available are often full time workers pushing past the point of exhaustion. In their exhaustion, they turn to coaches to fill in the gaps. Coaches have seen their professional responsibilities triple and their pay stagnate. The resulting stress means there is an ongoing, serious, mental health crisis among coaches.
The impact of that crisis is felt perhaps no more acutely by the athletes, who face increasing pressure to perform sooner in order to justify playing a sport, and are surrounded by increasingly, stressed, exhausted people.
Notice, I haven’t even gotten to the situation with college swimming, which effectively created 50+ National Training centers that would be the envy of any rich Western European country, a system that is now under threat of totally collapsing.
Summer league remains mostly viable although it is contracting rather than growing at best. In that it is failing to meet the demand that could catapult swimming forward.
USA Swimming may not be able to do much to fix any of the above, but they should ask themselves a very important question, one that should guide them out of this steady and worrying decline:
“What can we do to not make these things worse?”. At their inception, they made the fundamental mistake of believing they were making things better. They failed to understand what was actually creating the medal haul, but there’s still time to course correct. It’s going to take leadership that has a big enough ego to take charge and a small enough ego to ask the right question.