Thanks to the efforts of the USMS History & Archives Committee, and the Records & Tabulation Committee, the USMS Top Ten listings now go back to 1971. John Bauman of Wisconsin and Barbara Dunbar of San Diego led the effort to collect and organize the old Top Ten listings. :cheerleader:
The Top Ten searchable database can be found here: http://www.usms.org/comp/tt/
Some of our active Forumites can be found in these listings. For example, search on Allen Stark's name and you'll see that he first made the USMS Top Ten as a 25-year-old in 1974. Rich Abrahams first appears in 1975, as a 30-year-old.
In terms of sheer numbers, it's hard to imagine anyone with more Top Ten swims than June Krauser. Since 1972 June has amassed a total of 1,372 individual Top Ten swims!
I have to ask how accurate is this list that is pre 1993? For example did the committee that put this together take the published lists without Errata?
The "committee" that worked on this was largely John and Barbara and from what I can tell a huge part of their effort was spent on the "swimmer identification" problem that Jim described. But I have relayed your question to them and will post the answer when I receive it.
Full accuracy is not possible when you are talking about data that are 20-40 years old. There is always updating to do. We felt that we were at the point where the data are ready for the public and that having many eyes spot individual errors will help us improve the accuracy far more quickly than just a handful of people poring over the data. So send corrections my way (by snail mail if necessary) and we'll get to fixing them.
John continues to work on this. Even since he submitted the data (earlier this year) that are now available, he has already identified a number of people with incorrect IDs and has filled in some missing LMSC and Club data.
I was also wondering if Relays are going to be reported?
A quote from John: "Once I complete working on the member registrations from 1986 to 1993 I will attempt to work on Top Ten Relays for years 1971 to 1992."
Yeah, it's sort of like around 1990 you decided to retire from the event!
I was in grad school in the late 80s and swimming a few times a week was my exercise, while masters meets were part of my social outlet (in fact, I met my wife at one of those early masters meets, so that worked out).
I can barely remember back that far, but I think since I never really swam 50 free in HS or college I wanted to see what the fuss was all about. Apparently I wasn't very impressed. :)
