The Games Big Boys & Girls Play

 It has been an interesting week at the National Training Centre. The Age Group Championships are in full swing. Everything is stunningly normal. Hundreds of teenagers are busy warming up and cooling down. Nervous coaches pace around the pool with an intensity way beyond anything you’d see at the Olympic Games. Tired parents are beginning show signs of wanting this drama to end. The flight home can’t come soon enough. And all of it reported by self-important experts on Facebook with a passion normally reserved for international conflicts.

I had an enjoyable chat today with two well-known and experienced coaches. We discussed the gap between events in Auckland and the preparation required to be successful in open international swimming. We agreed that success in an age group event is very different from open international swimming. Many swimmers, parents, commentators and even coaches believe that a winning age group swimmer will graduate into a successful senior swimmer by simply doing a bit more of the same thing.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Success in open international swimming is very different from age group swimming. They might as well be different sports; chalk and cheese. The American sprinter, Carl Lewis, said, “There is no correlation between success as a junior athlete and success as an elite senior competitor.” I agree with that. The intensity, training, pressure, professionalism of senior competition has almost nothing in common with events in Auckland this week.

Let’s consider something as simple as the amount of training as an example. Set out in the table below is a typical season for a senior female swimmer. In this season the swimmer won a national championship, was placed in an international championship and broke a national open record. The table shows the distance and competitions swum each week.

Week Distance Swum Training Type Competition Results
1 100 Aerobic
2 100 Aerobic
3 100 Aerobic
4 100 Aerobic
5 94 Aerobic
6 100 Aerobic
7 95 Aerobic
8 100 Aerobic
9 100 Aerobic
10 96 Aerobic
0
11 85 Anaerobic
12 80 Anaerobic
13 80 Anaerobic
14 80 Anaerobic
15 56 Anaerobic
0
16 40 Competition Provincial Championship – First place
17 36 Competition Provincial Championship – First place
18 20 Competition Provincial Championship – First place
19 24 Competition State Championship Australia – First place
20 20 Competition Local Interclub – First place
21 24 Competition National Championship – First place
22 20 Competition
23 30 Competition Regional Champs – First place, Open Record
24 31 Competition
25 28 Competition
26 20 Competition International Champs – Second place
Total 1659

That’s 1659 kilometres in 26 weeks or 3200 kilometres in a year. You will find that is pretty standard fare for a modern international swimmer on an aerobically based program. But certainly, I would think, much more than the training load swum by age group swimmers in Auckland.

In addition to their training, good senior swimmers spend time in the gym. In the season shown in the table, the swimmer lifted weights on 111 occasions. In 26 weeks that a little over an average of 4 gym sessions a week.

I guess there are two points to all this. First is the Carl Lewis point. The training and approach required to prepare an international athlete are very different and have little in common with age group swimming. The coaching skills required are very different. And second, age group success is of limited value in predicting senior international success.

There are dangers in the gulf that exists between age group and senior swimming. The most serious is the damage of too much praise. New Zealand is especially bad at this. Swimming New Zealand and Facebook write up the conquering feats of the young using a stunningly extensive vocabulary of superlatives. Swimmers “star” in “record breaking form”. And “Ciara Smith did a pretty handy 1:09.83 faster than anyone at NZ opens and think that time would have got her a semi-final at the Commonwealth Games.” It is extremely easy for that praise to become a burden. Commentators know not the damage they inflict.

It is for this reason that the Americans did away with national age group competition. The damage caused could not be justified. The Americans do have a junior under 18 championship but that’s it. Clearly that protects younger swimmers from the stress of national competition. I refused to let two very good age group swimmers I coached even attend the New Zealand age group meet. Both were age group record holders but, on Lydiard’s advice, I desperately wanted them to avoid the dangers of age group championship swimming. Both went on to represent New Zealand in senior international events and set open national records.

Facts appear to support the idea that Age Group Championships are a bad indicator of senior success. I prepared a list of the winners of every event in the 2007 and 2010 Championships. So there were two questions – how many of the junior national champions were still swimming in their late teens and early twenties and how many were swimming at the same championship winning level?

The answer is that the events at these two championships were won by 71 swimmers. Of the 71 swimmers, 58 (82%) were no longer swimming and 13 swimmers (18%) were still competing. Of those still competing 5 swimmers (7%) had won a senior national title. So the figures fully support the rule of thumb 80% drop-out rate. However, remember the swimmers studied were the winners; the national champions. And yet even in this group the drop-out rate was 82%. It could be even higher for less successful swimmers.

Dr John Mullen, editor of the “Swimming Science Research Review”, conducted a study similar to my New Zealand analysis. His findings are published on the website, “Swimming Science”. Mullen looked at swimmers at a much higher level than those in my New Zealand analysis. His study examined 87 swimmers who had competed in the 2008 Junior World Championships and evaluated their performance in the 2012 Olympic Games. Of the 87 swimmers, 66 swimmers (76%) did not participate in the Olympic Games. Of the 21 swimmers (24%) who did qualify to compete in the Games, no one won a medal and just 3 (4%) managed to qualify for a final.

The table below summarises and compares my New Zealand Championship study results with Dr Mullen’s Junior World Championship results.

Item NZ Study Olympic Study
Number % Number %
Number of swimmers in study 71 100 87 100
Number of drop-outs 58 82 66 76
Number in senior event 13 18 21 24
Number swimming successfully in senior event 5 7 3 4

The studies looked at very different levels of competition; one local and the other international. The findings however are remarkably similar. The data confirms that in both studies about three quarters of the swimmers retire from swimming after their success at a junior event. About one quarter make it through to the senior ranks and about 5% are successful. Drop-out, it seems, is a problem at all levels of junior swimming. The shift from the junior to the national swimming team is one of the most challenging milestones in a swimmer’s career.

0 responses. Leave a Reply

  1. Swimwatch

    Today

    Be the first to leave a comment!

Comments are closed.