Swim Poll of the Week: 75% Believe Swimmers Should Have More Meet Options For Olympic Qualification

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This is the Swim Poll of the Week for Thursday May 6, 2021, sponsored by Strechcordz Swim Training Products. In our last poll, we wanted to know: Do you think all national federations should adopt one single meet as an Olympic qualifier or use any number of meets they deem appropriate?

The United States, Australia and Canada will all hold their Olympic Trials in June as the US and Australia have not pre-selected anybody to the team and have a famous cut-throat approach to the qualification period. Each swimmer must perform on the day, otherwise they’ll be watching the Games at home. It’s a harsh system, but one that ensure each nation will send their best delegation to the Games, worthy of swimming in the highest pressure situation.

This leaves zero margin for error, as a disqualification in the prelims or semi-finals could leave some big names off the team, most famously coming from Ian Thorpe false starting in the heats of the 400 free at the 2004 Trials, before getting his spot and eventually winning the gold.

Other countries like Great Britain and many of the other European nations, are using multiple meets for selection, since they are using the top two that get under the FINA A standard as the means of picking their teams. Some countries selected their swimmers well in advance, to rid them of the stressful qualification that is the Olympic Trials. Is this the better option? Perhaps for smaller countries that don’t have as many world class swimmers as the United States and Australia, this is a more effective way to select the team. But we wanted to ask our audience what they thought.

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Do you think all national federations should adopt one single meet as an Olympic qualifier or use any number of meets they deem appropriate?

Yes, give them more options – 75%

No, give them one chance – 25%


ONE IN THOUSAND

 

 

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