sportsillustrated.cnn.com/.../index.html
From the man whose WR has been broken four times in the last two months.....
I like his attitude. He could never be a USMS swimmer. Too much whining here about everything.
Your questions can be answered to some degree by someone (not me) willing to invest some time.
Records fall all the time of course, but -- without examining the historical data -- I would guess that they tend to happen in clusters to some degree. Whether this lastest batch is unusual, I don't know; it certainly seems that way.
There's a nice bar graph of world records set by year in Colwin's "Breakthrough Swimming". There are some clear spikes in the graph indicating this is right, that some years just see bunches of records being set at once. I'll have to see if I can dig up a link, b/c he pulled it from another reference, I believe.
"Breakthrough Swimming", chapter 13.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like the google book's free preview includes the graph page, but there's still a good discussion of swimming technology -- tech suits, training methods, etc. There's even a quote from Popov in there about his preference for briefs over tech suits.
The upshot is that record clusters come not only from new technologies, but from a conflation of that with advances in training methodology, accumulated rule changes, and generations that see particularly gifted swimmers. Add to that the fact that Olympic years ratchet up the intensity, and you get records falling in droves.
It will be interesting, a year from now, to add the numbers of records from this year into the mix to see if there is a larger spike than in previous cycles.
Your questions can be answered to some degree by someone (not me) willing to invest some time.
Records fall all the time of course, but -- without examining the historical data -- I would guess that they tend to happen in clusters to some degree. Whether this lastest batch is unusual, I don't know; it certainly seems that way.
There's a nice bar graph of world records set by year in Colwin's "Breakthrough Swimming". There are some clear spikes in the graph indicating this is right, that some years just see bunches of records being set at once. I'll have to see if I can dig up a link, b/c he pulled it from another reference, I believe.
"Breakthrough Swimming", chapter 13.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like the google book's free preview includes the graph page, but there's still a good discussion of swimming technology -- tech suits, training methods, etc. There's even a quote from Popov in there about his preference for briefs over tech suits.
The upshot is that record clusters come not only from new technologies, but from a conflation of that with advances in training methodology, accumulated rule changes, and generations that see particularly gifted swimmers. Add to that the fact that Olympic years ratchet up the intensity, and you get records falling in droves.
It will be interesting, a year from now, to add the numbers of records from this year into the mix to see if there is a larger spike than in previous cycles.
