Phelps is going down ....

About the times -- sure they are meaningless at this meet, but times have ALWAYS been dropping and that does not cause great champions to lose their credibility. I swam faster in the 200 Free as age grouper than Mark Spitz -- just 14 years after him being the greatest swimmer in history. Does that make me a better 200 Freestyler than him ? Does that mean his world record was meaningless ? Hoch, you're a fast guy. If the times turn out that way, I think it is fair to say that you were a better swimmer than Mark Spitz (allowing some leeway for the mustache effect). The reason we admire Spitz isn't because he was more skilled than any of us at swimming, it's because he was ahead of his time. That's why it's nice to have some consistency in the records. And until last year we pretty much had that. We were able to talk about how amazing Janet Evans was that her records still stood after a couple decades, stuff like that. It's all jumbled up now. Thorpe's 400 record could very well have been the same way, but it's been erased and even Biedermann said he couldn't have done it without a new suit.

About the times -- sure they are meaningless at this meet, but times have ALWAYS been dropping and that does not cause great champions to lose their credibility. I swam faster in the 200 Free as age grouper than Mark Spitz -- just 14 years after him being the greatest swimmer in history. Does that make me a better 200 Freestyler than him ? Does that mean his world record was meaningless ? Hoch, you're a fast guy. If the times turn out that way, I think it is fair to say that you were a better swimmer than Mark Spitz (allowing some leeway for the mustache effect). The reason we admire Spitz isn't because he was more skilled than any of us at swimming, it's because he was ahead of his time. That's why it's nice to have some consistency in the records. And until last year we pretty much had that. We were able to talk about how amazing Janet Evans was that her records still stood after a couple decades, stuff like that. It's all jumbled up now. Thorpe's 400 record could very well have been the same way, but it's been erased and even Biedermann said he couldn't have done it without a new suit.