In Spite of Record-Setting Top Ends, Times-to-Advance Slow at Budapest 2022

2022 FINA WORLD AQUATICS CHAMPIONSHIPS

• June 18-25, 2022 (pool swimming)
• Budapest, Hungary
• Duna Arena
• LCM (50-meter format)
• Full Aquatics Schedule
• How To Watch
• Psych Sheets
• Start Lists Book (pre-meet)
• Meet Central
• Live Results
• SwimSwam Pick ’em Contest
• Day 1 Prelims Live Recap

The first session of swimming is in the books at the 2022 World Aquatics Championships in Budapest, Hungary.

With national records from France, Brazil, Austria, South Korea, Israel, Italy, and a number of other smaller swimming nations, plus some really fast relay splits, we have to be careful about saying that the first prelims session of the meet was slow. It was not slow, and many swimmers came to swim fast.

But what we can say is that the first prelims session exposed the lack of depth that we knew was going to be present at this meet. In each of the 8 Olympic events from Saturday morning, the time to advance from the prelims was slower than the same time at the Tokyo Olympics.

That lack of depth is driven by a few things. There are a number of other international meets this summer (Commonwealth Games, Mediterranean Games, European Championships) that athletes are either putting their full taper on (Matt Sates) or bypassing Worlds altogether for (Emma McKeon). We are also still in the midst of the pandemic, which has already claimed a few swimmers at this meet.

The effect isn’t the simple output of being a post-Olympic year (though it could be chalked up to being this post-Olympic year, which is among the most unique post-Olympic years since the World Championships began).

Even if we compare to the 2019 and 2017 World Championships, times-to-advance are still slower in most cases – with the men’s 50 fly, a non-Olympic race, being the biggest exception.

The deficits in some races is bigger than others: the men’s 400 free, for example, is only 8-tenths of a second slower than top 8 was in Tokyo. That’s low as compared to the women’s 400 free, for example, which has a 2.37 second gap.

The men’s 100 breaststroke and women’s 100 butterfly races were particularly challenging on day 1, with both over a second slower than Tokyo even in just a 100 meter race.

One race that isn’t as far as it seems is the men’s 400 IM. This is a race where we’ve seen global depth improve a lot recently, though it’s still a fairly thin event. While the time to advance was about 2.30 seconds slower than Tokyo, but the times in Tokyo after the top 10 dropped off really fast. So it’s only a few spots (4:12.50 was 14th in Tokyo prelims) as compared to other races (59.46 in the women’s 100 fly would have been 25th in Tokyo, for example).

Below, see a table comparing the time-to-advance-from-prelims across the last two World Championship meets plus the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics.