Random Swimming Athletes Generator

So you drew a swimmer

You wanted a swimmer and the tool up top gives you one, or several if you raise the number, from a list I keep by hand. It runs from the pioneers of the early twentieth century through to the current world record holders, across all four strokes and every distance from a fifty-metre sprint to a marathon in open water.

The tool is the simple part. Swimming rewards explanation, because it is the sport where the equipment and the rulebook have shaped the record book more visibly than in anything else on this site.

Four strokes, one of them an accident

Competitive swimming has four strokes: freestyle, backstroke, breaststroke and butterfly. Three of them are what they sound like. Freestyle, technically, is not a stroke at all, it is a category in which you may swim however you like, and everybody chooses front crawl because it is fastest, so the rule permits an innovation that has not arrived in a century.

Butterfly is the interesting one, because it exists because of a loophole. In the 1930s, breaststroke swimmers noticed that the rules said nothing about recovering the arms over the water rather than under it. It was faster. It was also legal, so they did it, and for two decades an increasingly strange arms race played out inside the breaststroke event, with swimmers whipping their arms over the surface while still kicking a frog kick. Eventually the sport gave up, split them apart, and butterfly became its own event. The most physically punishing stroke in the sport is a bureaucratic accident. When the tool draws you a swimmer, their stroke tells you a great deal about their body and their temperament.

Life spent staring at a black line

Here is what the sport asks. An elite swimmer will cover somewhere between eight and fifteen kilometres a day, twice a day, six days a week, face down, in silence, looking at a black line painted on the bottom of a pool. They cannot hear anything. They cannot talk to anyone. There is no ball, no opponent to read, no crowd until the very last day.

Michael Phelps trained on Christmas Day, every year, on the theory that his rivals were not. It sounds like an anecdote about dedication and it is really a description of the sport's basic condition: swimming is thousands of hours of sensory deprivation in the pursuit of shaving off tenths of a second, and then twenty seconds of racing every few years. The athletes on this list have each spent something like a full year of their lives underwater. That is not a metaphor. It is roughly the arithmetic.

The year the record book broke

Now the thing most people have forgotten. In 2008 and 2009 swimsuit manufacturers produced full-body suits made of polyurethane, which is not a fabric. The suits trapped air, compressed the body into a better shape, repelled water and made swimmers measurably faster. They also cost hundreds of pounds and lasted a handful of races.

What followed was absurd. Twenty-five world records fell at the 2008 Olympics. At the 2009 world championships in Rome, forty-three world records were broken in eight days. Swimmers who had never won anything were beating Olympic champions. The sport realised that it was no longer testing people, and from 2010 it banned all non-textile suits outright. The consequence is a permanent scar on the record book: a set of times set in 2008 and 2009 that ordinary humans in ordinary swimsuits then spent more than a decade failing to approach. Several still stand. So when the tool hands you a swimmer, check the year of their best times before you judge them, because for two seasons the sport was measuring the wrong thing.

The loneliest event in the pool

The sprinters get the attention, because fifty metres of freestyle is over in about twenty seconds and looks like violence. But the sport's most extraordinary performances tend to happen at the far end of the programme, where the distance swimmers live.

Katie Ledecky's dominance of the 800 and 1500 metres freestyle is difficult to convey to anybody who has not watched it. She does not out-touch her rivals. She swims away from them, and by the closing laps she is often alone in the picture, with the field a body length or more behind, and she has spent a decade holding world records that nobody else can approach. Adam Peaty did the equivalent in the hundred metres breaststroke, an event where he was for years the only man alive capable of a certain time. And beyond the pool entirely there is open-water swimming, ten kilometres in a lake or the sea, in a scrum of bodies, with no lane ropes and people grabbing your ankles. Draw a distance swimmer from this list and you have pulled somebody with an unusual relationship to discomfort.

What a random swimmer is good for

• Olympic sweepstakes. Draw swimmers for a group during the Games. There are more finals than in any other sport.
• Squad and club prompts. Coaches can draw a swimmer as a technique to study or a career to talk about.
• Quiz and trivia prep. Ask which world records date from 2009. It is a great question and almost nobody knows why it matters.
• Settling a debate. Pull two swimmers and argue the greater career, across eras with different suits and different rules.
• Discovering the sport. Draw a name and go and watch their final. Distance swimming in particular is better than its reputation.

Swimming questions

Why were swimsuits banned?

Because polyurethane suits worn in 2008 and 2009 made swimmers significantly faster. Forty-three world records fell at the 2009 world championships alone. The sport banned non-textile suits from 2010, but many of those records stood for more than a decade.

Why does butterfly exist?

It began as a legal loophole in breaststroke, where the rules did not forbid recovering the arms over the water. It was faster, everybody adopted it, and the sport eventually separated it into its own stroke.

Is freestyle the same as front crawl?

Not quite. Freestyle means you may swim any stroke you choose. Every competitive swimmer chooses front crawl because it is the fastest, so in practice the two words are used interchangeably.

Can I pull several swimmers, or narrow the pick?

Both. Raise the number for a few at once, with none repeating in a single pull, and use the text boxes to narrow things, such as a starts-with letter or a keyword the name has to contain.

References

1. World Aquatics. worldaquatics.com
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica, swimming. britannica.com