The Expected Surprises That Come At The U.S. Olympic Trials

On a recent SwimSwam podcast, despite making one of the worst hot-takes imaginable (that shall not be repeated here), one of the points I made was that we generally tend to under-estimate surprises in our picks for who makes the Olympic Team and that YanYan was right to pick Dare Rose and Alec Enyeart. Not necessarily because I think those two, specifically, have a high likelihood of making the team, but that there will very likely be somebody like that.

I went back and looked at what happened in the lead-up to the Tokyo Olympics. Looking at the World Rankings for 2020 is a bit odd, in light of some minor world event that year, so instead, I looked at 2019. How did our team rank in 2019?

We did have several #1 rankings, even in 2019. Familiar names like Katie Ledecky (twice), Caeleb Dressel (three times), Lilly King, Regan Smith, and Hali Flickinger. Out of the 71 person-events on the team, 29 (40.8%) had a top-10 world ranking in 2019, and 48 (67.6%) had a top-25 world ranking.

But as you can see in that table, there were some swimmers who ended up making the Tokyo team who maybe weren’t on the radar as much as necessarily strong candidates. Hunter Armstrong in 2019 was only the 88th-ranked man in the 100 back, and just barely cracked the top 20 among Americans. Rhyan White wasn’t in the top 100 in the world or the top 30 among Americans in either backstroke event. And neither Brooks Curry in the 100 free nor Bella Sims in the 200 free even ranked in the top 200 in the world at the time (recall that amazing post-swim press conference with where the rest of the 4×100 free relay found out how recently Curry made the FINA “A” cut in the event), with Sims not even being amongst the top 100 Americans.

In contrast, Dare Rose was 15th in the world in the 100 fly last year (51.40), and Alec Enyeart was 60th in the 800 free (7:58.68) and 40th in the 1500 free (15:12.70). Neither seems that far-fetched, from this perspective.

Alright, maybe 2021 was a weird year. Let’s look at something more normal: the 2016 Olympics in Rio. How did that team rank in 2014?

This isn’t actually all that different. We have 66 person-events (two fewer Olympic events back then), and again 29 (43.9%) top-10 rankings and 41 (62.1%) top-25 rankings. So it’s still a fairly significant percentage of the team was highly ranked in the world, even two years out.

But not all of the team. Maya DiRado may have been 5th and 7th in the 200 and 400 IMs, respectively, but she was just 89th in the world, and just 25th amongst Americans, in the 200 back. Nevertheless, she went on to win gold in that event in Rio. And, as we saw leading up to Tokyo, we have three cases of someone not even in the top 100 in the world and two more not even in the top 200. Ryan Held was just 95th amongst Americans in the 100 free in 2014, makes the team in the 4×100 free relay in 2016, and even swam in the Olympic FInal.

I have to note two especially odd things as far as the 2016 team is concerned: Dana Vollmer didn’t even swim in 2014, and had her first child in early 2015. And Michael Phelps didn’t swim the 200 fly in 2014, apparently. But I’m not sure we can draw too many conclusions from those two. Phelps is… Phelps, and Dana Vollmer had been making international teams for more than a decade at that point too.

So what’s the conclusion here? It seems a good bet that most of the Paris 2024 team will have been in the top 25 in the world rankings last year. But it’s likely that a few will be outside of the top 100, or maybe even outside the top 200. Braden, for instance, picked Kaii Winkler to make the 4×100 free relay. He was ranked 158th last year in the 100 free. To be clear, I’m not saying that makes Winkler a lock here – just that it shouldn’t necessarily be a surprise if somebody ranked this low last year does make their way onto the team next year.