Im canceling my subscription to Swimming World.
Yes all of the swimmers picked were VERY worthy and nothing against any of them or their accomplishments.
But your going to tell me that the panel who choose these 6 men and 6 women (and 8 runner ups) didn't deem Susan Von der Lippe worthy of this honor:
I guess something like a total of almost 30 Top 10 times in all 3 courses didn't count? nor did the tally of #1 times on those lists? And simply breaking 5 SCM world records over 2 days is...as we all know...a joke.
And I know this is a reach now...stay with me on this...but being the oldest female swimmer and the first over 40 to make Olympic Trials cuts all while working a job, raising kids/a family, training only 3x a week....yeah, yeah I know thats pushing it...so I won't even mention she made her second trials cuts a month ago since that was done over at an evil USS meet and SW is probably correct in their belief it "doesn't count" in the masters world.
Susan...nice try in 2007...but you'll need to step up a bit more in 2008 if you want to be considered.
Former Member
Paul,
Do we count trial cuts in the US only or would you propose counting trial cuts in all countries? If the latter, not all countries select their Olympic team the way we do with one meet. What would we do for swimmer from those countries? How would you get access to the information needed to make the decision?
I don't disagree that Susan's achievement (and other Masters swimmers who have made trial cuts) is most impressive. I am not sure how you would quantify that achievement for the purposes of judging fairly.
OK, I will take the unpopular position for the sake of giving the Smith Brothers someone to take aim at.
First, I think Susan is one of the nicest swimmers I have met at nationals. She is a pleasant and humble as she is talented. I look forward to cheering for her in Omaha.
As for the criteria. The are fairly quantitative. This is good. Some of the suggestions that have been made are very subjective and would make the contest something like judging ice skating.
Why go with FINA's timetable for recognizing swims and not go with the standard USMS seasons? If we were picking the USMS swimmers of the year, that would make sense. However, Swimming World (which we have no direct control over by the way) is selecting world swimmers. Part of the issue at hand is the availability of data to make the selection from. While Paul knows exactly what happened in Susan's age group, what about the others? How up to speed are you on the other 15 age groups, both men and women for SCM and LCM? The possible list of record breakers represents over 1000 events.
So, why not go with the FINA top 10 list in addition to broken records. I will defer to Skip's explanation on that one - the list is not available in a timely manner.
Making Olympic Trail cuts is indeed impressive. Since this is a world list, would we also count swimmers that made cuts in other countries? Again, access to that data would be challenging.
No system is perfect, however I suspect you could help improve it rather than just complain about it. Jason Marsteller is a reasonable guy. I don't know him as well as Phil Whitten (who came up with this system), but he has been approachable when I have spoken with him in the past. Put together an alternative that is reasonable to achieve. Remember, we have two courses, 16 age groups and two genders to search through to make the determination and data has to be for federations outside of the US.
on another thread something mentioned that you have to practice with a Masters team in order to get a top 10 time. isn't there a rule for getting records too?
There are no restrictions on who you practice with, the restriction is that you must do the record breaking swim in a sanctioned Masters meet.
