Team GB doing quite terribly in the pool this time round, 4 years hasn't been to kind to them so far.
To be fair, GB are actually doing really well in the pool when you look at the history of the Olympics. We have far more swimmers who are achieving finalist positions than ever before. Yes, they are not achieving the media desire of gaining medals. But I would say that consistency wise, they are having a very good Olympics Games for finalist positions.
Eventually, someone will get medals.
We already had Becky getting a bronze in an event that she is not that strong in (400 free was always a "lets swim and see what happens event" for her).
Liam Tancock is always going to be a 50m backstroker, it was a tall order for him to get anywhere near in the top three in the 100m backstroke. It is far easier to go from 200m to 100m than it is to go from 50m to 100m. Tancock has to pace his sprinting ability which is far harder to do than to simply keep swimming fast all the way through it when you step down a distance. I knew that Tancock had a possibility for 3rd, maybe 2nd if everything went exceedingly well, but 1st place was always going to be out of his reach. Sometimes it just doesn't happen.
Miley was disappointed not to achieve podium, even though she had done a good swim. Sometimes you can only do good swims on the day and your best swim just become elusive.
Personally, the amount of finalist swimmers that we have in the pool is impressive to see when you have seen previous Olympics and had very few British swimmers in the finals. Now we are almost spoilt for choice!
Apparently unless I'm mistaken they are known for it.
Damn, that's heavy. I didn't think the chinese would have it in them to do that. 16 years old, long career ahead, and the chinese have enough gold medal contenders as it is.
In the early 90's, the Chinese embarked on a systematic doping programme from the top down and this meant that a lot of competitors started doing world record times and performing extremely well. Then they got caught. From what I can remember, it was human growth hormones that they were using then. So whenever a Chinese swimmer does really well in the pool, other countries always have doubt in their minds whether it is a legal performance or not. However I suspect that most of the Chinese swimmers would have been coached and trained to be clean and to avoid temptations.
Personally, I think the American swimming coach should have waited for the doping results first and then announced his doubts after the swimming competition has finished, because voicing his concerns now would seem a bit childish in a way. Also, the American Olympic team had trouble in the past with doping cheats, so it would be a bit of a contradition for him to say that.
Age group swimmers are an exciting prospects (these are 18 yrs and under) as they do actually drop their times a lot in between competitions. It is not uncommon for swimmers in that category to reduce their times by 5 to 10 seconds. It is all down to their bodies developments and technique improvements. Some swimmers develop later and so that's when they have the most remarkable reduction in their times.
The only issue with the Chinese swimming team is that the majority of them are generally unknown to the other swimmers as most of them train 365 days a year in a swimming camp in which they pretty much breathe swimming all the time. Their entire life is dedicated towards swimming so they sort of develop swimmers who are like machines in the water. They do tend to practice isolationism most of the time and only ever go international for World and Olympic events.
It is because no-one knew them before the Olympics, this is why accusations happens as other swimming teams try to understand exactly how that particular swimmer get to be so fast and had slipped under the radar.
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