In the past few months, the world has been turned upside down. Towns, cities and entire countries are being ravaged by the Corona Virus. It seems like all facets of regular life are being flipped on their heads. The swimming world is no different. It all started when the Ivy League declared that it would not be sending any of its sports to any more competitions. Then other conferences followed. Like dominos, one after the next organizations all canceled their swim meets. USA swimming put a 30-day ban on all competition. The YMCA canceled its national meet. Finally, the NCAA canceled the college national championship.
All of these cancellations have had huge effects all across the sport. High school juniors and seniors who counted on having a championship meet to help them in college recruiting are now left high and dry. College swimmers who worked their entire lives to qualify for the second-fastest meet in the world (behind the Olympics) have had their hopes and dreams slashed without any warning. Some careers have ended, as TS Elliot would say, with a whimper, not a bang.
Aside from the huge personal tragedy that this mass cancelation has been. The effects of the cancellation will be felt long after swimmers are allowed back in the water. Swimming is a sport that doesn’t really have an offseason. Since the impacts are so low swimmers do not worry about the negative injury effects of overtraining and since the water is not a natural medium for humans to move in, swimmers try and maintain their “feel” for the water by swimming a few miles every day even when in the offseason. Since most pools have been closed, and all university teams have been forced to stop organized practice a lot of elite swimmers will be taking the longest break from the water that they have had in years. With less than 150 days until the Olympics being away from training is not a good thing. The next few months will see Olympic hopefuls across the US and abroad fighting for pools space, and trying as hard as they can to maintain normalcy.
The effects of the forced hiatus will be hard to fully quantify, but I suspect that certain nations will be noticeably lacking at the Olympics in a few months. Italy is a nation that usually has a few very good swimmers. Being on house arrest will make it not only hard to train in the water but also hard to stay in shape at all. All this to say: don’t be surprised if the next Olympics has few world records fall.