This is somewhat related to another post I just started (Top Ten conerns). I noticed in the top ten list a number of swimmers (generally very fast swimmers) who swam their first nationals (or any other masters meet) in 5 years due to being in a new age group. I state this by looking at the past few years top ten lists and not seeing their names. Is this a good thing for masters swimming? Swimmers whose only affiliation with masters swimming is showing up to one meet every 5 years to break a record. These records should be owned by people that are true masters swimmers.
What is a true masters swimmers?- Perhaps doing a few meets a year might work. When I swam on an age group team as a child, I know in order to qualify for our championship meet, we had to swim at least 3 regular meets. Perhaps a rule like that for Nationals could begin to fix this problem-
If not, many of our national records will be held by "ringers"
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Former Member
Sorry Ion, my intention was not to pick on you.
What I was trying to do was make a point to the original poster that it would be impossible to define criteria for record setting based on something other than time.
Whether people swim in more meets, less meets, national meets, local meets, are active in the masters community(whatever that means), a nice person, eat HoHos, lead lanes in workout, swam in high school, swam at a university, are extremely talented in the pool, etc isn't relevant.
If a person falls off the back of a turnip truck, registers with USMS, goes to a sanctioned meet and swims faster than the documented record then he/she is the new record holder. We may not like it or we may be jealous but it doesn't change the basic fact that. The record was broken.
Just my opinion.
Sorry Ion, my intention was not to pick on you.
What I was trying to do was make a point to the original poster that it would be impossible to define criteria for record setting based on something other than time.
Whether people swim in more meets, less meets, national meets, local meets, are active in the masters community(whatever that means), a nice person, eat HoHos, lead lanes in workout, swam in high school, swam at a university, are extremely talented in the pool, etc isn't relevant.
If a person falls off the back of a turnip truck, registers with USMS, goes to a sanctioned meet and swims faster than the documented record then he/she is the new record holder. We may not like it or we may be jealous but it doesn't change the basic fact that. The record was broken.
Just my opinion.
