Olympic Swimming: THE Records

By Bill Mallon, MD, Past-President and Co-Founder of the International Society of Olympic Historians (ISOH)

PHOENIX, Arizona, July 6. FOLLOWING is an exhaustive list of various records that have been set at the Olympic Games in swimming. The lists do include the 1906 Olympics, which the IOC does not recognize, but most Olympic historians do, but all marks set including the 1906 Olympics are marked in red.

The length of the lists is variable. Given the ease of running queries on databases, they could be much longer, in all cases. As a basic guideline, I have cut off the lists at about 50 occurrences, and have also not listed medal records in any list for only 1 medal won.

Age competitor records are given for the athletes, and the date of the event is the date of the first day of any event. For competitor age marks, I have not tried to determine cases in which the athlete competed on a later date, that database query gets quite complex. The age medalist and gold medalist records, however, are taken to the final day of the event, on which the athlete actually won the medal. Thus there can be minor differences for ages. All age marks are given as “years-days”, which is more accurate than listing months, which can have a variable number of days.

For the rare cases in which we do not know a full date of birth for the athlete, usually only knowing the year, I have used a worst-case scenario, i.e., for youngest records, the athlete are assumed to be born on 1 January of the year of birth, and for oldest records, they are assumed to be born on 31 December of the year of birth.

For the Olympic record progressions, please note that the IOC does not recognize marks for Olympic records set in preliminary rounds, and recognizes only one mark in any event from any Olympic Games as a record. This policy is, obviously, not shared by the ISSA or swimming or sports statisticians.

The data herein comes from our Olympic database of complete results of all sports, all events, all years, and all events. This is a group effort, with our group being called the OlyMADMen, for somewhat obvious reasons. We now have about 12 people assisting us on this project, with the original founders being myself, Jeroen Heijmans (NED), and Arild Gjerde (NOR). This can be found at our public site at www.sports-reference.com/olympics, or at our private site, www.olympedia.org. If you would like access to our private site for reference, which is the base site used for research, and from which the Sports Reference site is derived, you may contact me. They are different with slightly more information on Olympedia. Please also contact me for any errors or omissions found. You may contact me at bill1729@gmail.com.

Complete Records

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