Gary Francis seems to have an obsession with numbers. In the Swimming New Zealand (SNZ) Wellington meeting he droned on about the statistical chances of this and the probability of that. It was all rubbish of course. Sport is not played on a probability table. In the Francis’ world Russia would already be eliminated from the World Football Cup. Instead they have scored eight goals and look likely to progress at the top of their group. I’d love to see the Francis’ probability table explain that aberration. But let’s indulge Francis for a moment. Let’s look at the statistical probability of New Zealand winning a medal in the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games.

Some attempts have been made to predict swimming performance in an Olympic Games. For example in 2004 Trewin verified that by examining the relationship between world-ranking and the 2000 Olympic performance, most of the Olympic medallists (87 %) had a top-10 world-ranking in the Olympics year. And another researcher, Pyne, found that Olympic medallists improved by 1.4% in the twelve months prior to winning their medals.

So let’s take these two findings and apply them to New Zealand’s best swimmers. Let’s take their best times in 2017/18 and ask and answer the following questions.

1. Does any New Zealand swimmer have a current ranking in the world’s top ten? In other words right now do they have an 87% chance of winning an Olympic medal if the Games were being swum next week?
2. If their best 2017/18 time improved by 1.4% in the next twelve months where would that new time rank in the world? Would they then be in the top ten and have an 87% chance of winning an Olympic medal if the Games were held next year?

The first table below shows the answer to the first of those questions for several of New Zealand’s best swimmers. The conclusion is simply that no New Zealand swimmer is statistically within a hundred miles of meeting the top ten criteria. If the Games were being held next week the statistical chances of a New Zealand swimmer winning a medal are non-existent. Cotterill and Johns – this is what YOU have brought us to.

In preparing the table of current world rankings I have:

1. Only included swimmers ranked inside 50^th in the world
2. Have deleted Matt Hutchins because he has retired
3. Have not included non-Olympic events
4. Have taken the world rankings for the past twelve month period from July 2017 to June 2018.

And so what happens if any of this group improves by 1.4%. In other words the Pyne predicted amount necessary to win a medal. How many would move into the top ten? How many would move into the top three. Here is what the data says.

And so, seeing as we are playing the silly game of Francis trivial statistics, what does the data show. It says that if Main and Clareburt improve by the amounts typical of the world’s best swimmers in the next twelve months they should be good enough to be in the world’s top ten. And it is from the world’s top ten that the Olympic medals will be found. No one will be good enough to break into the world’s top three.

There are two downsides to our game. First we are assuming the rest of the world will stand still. They will not improve. One hundred years of swimming history suggests that is unlikely. And second, as Tunisia found out this morning, Gary Francis’ statistics mean nothing when it comes to results. If they did Snell would never have won the Rome 800, Ali would never have beaten Liston and Leicester City would never have won the Premier League.

Put it this way – if the predictions made in this post are going to amount to anything the sport is going to need a lot more out of Gary Francis than we have seen so far. Five months to deliver a few tables of times and have a meeting in Wellington is not enough. We need more than that for our money. We need much more than that to win a swimming race.