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>>Kyle Chalmers & Caeleb Dressel
5 Eye-Popping Stats That Defined the Tokyo Olympics, Including Fastest Men’s 100 Freestyle Ever BY DAVID RIEDER
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welve years ago, the 2009 World Championships saw the sport of swimming taken to insane new levels of speed as swimmers embraced full-body, polyurethane suits that would be banned from the sport months later. Swimmers broke 43 world records that week, seven of which still stand. Most of the finals and podiums were faster than any other heat in history. In particular, in the men’s 100 freestyle saw two-time defending world champion Filippo Magnini swim a 48.04 and finish ninth. You did not get into the final unless you swam under 48 seconds. That never happened again until the Tokyo Olympics. The cutoff time to make the 2016 Olympic final was 48.23. At the 2017 World Championships, 48.31, and two years later, 48.33. But in Tokyo, Serbia’s Andrej Barna swam a 47.94 in the semifinals — and placed ninth. Andrei Minakov, Zach Apple and Thomas Ceccon all swam 48.0s. Teenagers Jacob Whittle and Joshua Liendo were in the 48.1 range. Canada’s Yuri Kisil touched in 48.31, which would have at least tied for eighth at each of the past two World Championships, and that was good enough for 15th place. On the other side of the brutal cutline for the final, France’s Maxime Grousset placed eighth in 47.82 — the exact same time that won bronze at the World Championships just two years earlier. So while Caeleb Dressel and Kyle Chalmers almost exactly repeated their epic gold-medal battle, the rest of the field behind them had massively elevated the level of competition.
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But the men’s 100 free was not the only Olympic race that featured some crazy statistics. Here are four more. Regan Smith Faster Than Any Other 100 Backstroke World or Olympic Champion In 2019, Regan Smith led a gigantic leap forward in the 100 backstroke when she swam a 57.57 leading off the women’s 400 medley relay at the World Championships. But in 2021, Smith struggled in the backstroke events while Australia’s Kaylee McKeown and Canada’s Kylie Masse caught up. In the Olympic final, Smith could not keep pace with those two rivals as McKeown won gold in 57.47, just two hundredths off her month-old world record, and Masse was second in 57.73. Smith earned bronze in 58.05. That time would have won every previous major international final ever. At the last World Championships, Masse’s gold-medalwinning time was 58.60. The world record at the time belonged to Kathleen Baker at 58.00, and at the Worlds before that, Masse had broken an eight-year-old supersuit world record with her 58.10. Smith finishing three tenths away from silver shows just how much that event has improved in an incredibly short period of time. So while Smith’s time did not stack up to her previous remarkable swims, it was still remarkable by any standard other than this year’s. Kristof Milak Beats Almost Every Phelps Winning Margin Prior to the men’s 200 butterfly final in Tokyo, Kristof Milak’s suit ripped, and he had to change last-minute. The
