Did Olympic team taper?

Like Australia did.

Certainly not all US swimmers swam better but many did. Some swam worse. I would expect that to happen regardless of when we had the trials. Australia had trials much earlier and my very unscientific observation is that they didn't do any better.

I thought many of our swimmers looked like their taper was off.As I remember in 2000 we had early trials & in general we did better than expected. I hope USA Swimming will take this into account for 2008.

Yeah, there was no time for the US swimmers to build up any yardage after trials for a good taper into the games. I hope in the future they will alot more time between the venues.

As I remember in 2000 we had early trials & in general we did better than expected. Trials were pretty much exactly the same in 2000. We swam about the same dominated both Olympiads. Just b/c not many records were broken and they might have been a bit slower, from what I hear the pool/weather/atmosphere were nothing like Syndney or Long Beach for that matter. In 1996 we had trials much earlier, some people said we didn't have the team unity we had in 2000/2004 since they broke after trials and did not come back together until months later. This way right after trials they go into training camp and don't break until after the Olympics. You have to admit the team looked like a team ex Gary Hall. I always think having trials so close to the Olypimcs might not be a good thing, but you can't argue the results. Yes some people did not swim as well but look at the other countries. We dominated again no questions asked.

When the OIOC of USA Swimming was considering when to hold the 2000 Trials, we (at Sports Publications) were asked to analyze the percentage of best times performed at the Big Meet depending upon how far in advance of that Big Meet the Trials were held. (For this analysis, "Big Meet" referred solely to the Olympics and World Championships.) We went back about 30 years and what we found was that the highest percentage of personal best times at the Big Meet occurred when Trials were held about 4 weeks (+/- 1 week) ahead of the Big Meet. There was some difference between men and women (a higher percentage of men than women performed PBs with this time interval between Trials and the Big Meet), though this time interval was still the best one for the women. There was also, of course, a great deal of individual variation, with some swimmers performing better with longer intervals. Still, overall, the 4-week interval appeared to produce the best results. Consequently, USA Swimming adopted the 4-week interval for the 2000 Olympic Games and reaffirmed that decision in fixing the dates for the 2004 Trials.

This taper thing has always been too much art and not enough science. But there is one great thing to come out of this years Olympics, Amanda Beard. She performed great. Why did she do so great and many of our other women did not do as well? This one is too easy. Amanda learned to swim great on any day of the year. By swimming World Cup where big Bucks (and I don't mean deer) are at stake. She might swim in Sweeden one weekend, and win $50,000. The next weekend Berlin, Ka-Ching another $50,000. Then on to China or London, more money. This is where she played with the 200 freestyle and 200 IM. Mark Spitz could break world records in practice, I bet Phelps could do it too. This bit of only swimming fast once a year is just poor coaching. Speaking of the womens 200 freestyle, how lame is a 1:58? Sippy Woodhead was doing that 20 years ago. Natalie would have won the 200 easily, she only led off the relay in a 1:57.

I've never swam at a level where a taper mattered. My understanding is that a taper targets a narrow time frame -- perhaps two days or so. How can someone taper for a 10-day meet? Either the taper hits the beginning few days (and then I guess you would start losing conditioning after that?) or you target the last few days. (Or maybe I'm just way off base, and therefore I would appreciate some education here!) What kind of workout would someone like Phelps have done during the days of the olympic events? Would he do long warm-ups each day? Or would he actually do some sort of workout as well?

I don't think there will ever be any consensus on when to hold trials. I can see advantages to holding trials earlier. Holding the trials 3-4 months earlier than the Olympics gives the swimmers enough time to go through another training cycle before tapering again. However, there is no guarantee that the people swimming the best 4 months ago will be the best come the Olympics. Having the trials a month before the Olympics pretty much guarantees that you are taking the fastest swimmers at this particular moment. It's not the easiest thing to hold the taper for a month but it's certainly not something that's impossible. I think anything in the 2-3 month period before Olympics is not a good idea. You would get to the point where you can't get into another training cycle and it would be hard to carry a taper through that long of a period. Good arguments can be made for either case but I would lean towards doing it the way we did it this year. You'll often see age groupers taper for a meet, make a junior cut, and then go to nationals a few weeks later and swim even faster. Same thing in college swimming with the time difference between conference meets and NCAAs - excluding the few who get A cuts during the season.

Where you got the idea that a taper is mental, and more of an art than a science, I will never know. I have extensive background in the sciences, so maybe these things just make sense to me. However, I thought the idea of a taper is quite elementary. There is a great deal of science that surrounds the concept of a taper. Granted there are psychological attributes present, however, with out the biological physical changes, a taper would not deem so successful. As I have always been taught, an increase in blood lactate is related to increase in swimming velocity. During high workload volume lactate amount will decrease and then only increase as the workload diminishes (Taper). Therefore, differences in lactate and cortisol concentrations during preparatory and competitions and relations to the swimming velocity are greatly understood. Differences in Performances, Lactate Responses and Pre-competition Plasma Cortisol Concentrations upon research greatly back this concept.