Friday Factoid: US Olympic Trials Schedule Chart

As we are in the middle of arguably the two biggest meets of the summer, the FINA World Championships and the US Summer Nationals, many of our beloved SwimSwam readers and commentators are doubtless engaging the ever-popular game of “Which Events Will My Favorite Swimmer Choose to Swim at the 2016 US Olympic Trials?”

That’s one of our favorite games too, and while we’re working diligently on getting it turned into a board game (projected sales in the dozens!!), we thought we’d tide you over for a little bit, and help you avoid baseless speculation, by taking the schedule that is in list form on the USA Swimming website and condense it into two charts, one for men and one for women.

Now, for the majority of swimmers with Olympic Trials cuts, deciding what to swim will not be an over-excruciating process: either they only have cuts in a couple events, or they know they don’t have a realistic shot of advancing beyond preliminaries.

There are, however, those few swimmers who are at an elite level in multiple events, and those are the ones you’re talking about: Michael Phelps, Ryan Lochte, Missy Franklin, Natalie Coughlin, among others.  These swimmers and ones who have similar strengths, but have yet to make an Olympic team, are the ones for whom you’ll want to see where their potential events fall on the schedule.

Want to see someone swim the 100/200 breast, 100/200 free, and 200/400 IM?  Good luck with that.  That kind of Phelpsian schedule would require several doubles, and one triple, assuming said swimmer made it to finals in each event.

In fact, one thing we noticed is that the Trials schedule, which mirrors the Olympic schedule, makes it very difficult for anyone who swims stroke 100s or 200s to qualify in the free relays, given typical USA selection procedures.

For instance, of the men with the top 17 times in the free so far this year for the USA, five of them are likely to be swimming in the finals of either the 200 back, 200 fly, or 200 IM.  The finals of the 200 fly come after the semi-finals of the 100 free on Wednesday night, and the finals of the 100 free are sandwiched in between the 200 back and 200 IM on Thursday night.  So, if you’re one of these guys, what do you do?  Stick with your stroke and hope you can make top two?  Or decide to focus on the freestyles, where you only need to be in the top six to make the team?

Anyway, enough jibber-jabber on our part.  Take a look at the schedules, then feel free to leave comments with your speculations, expectations, jubilations, or vociferations.

*Blue text denotes semi-final round.

Men

Women