Sheffield Once Again the Scene for Selection Drama

It’s not a summer with the unexpected excitement of a last-minute world championships shoehorned in before two more international meets, but after the whirlwind of 2022, there’s still the small matter of an actual, planned for, world championships for swimmers to target as we approach trials season once more.

For Britain’s swimmers that also means poring over the minutiae of a selection policy to figure out exactly what they need to do in Sheffield in April to book their ticket to Fukuoka, and in common with most policies of the Spice/Furniss era, it is not entirely straightforward.

This year there are no pre-selections so everybody on a team of up to 30 swimmers will be picked from the trials. Here’s how it works.

Win and do the QT

The so-called easy way. Well, it’s easy in the sense that if a swimmer wins an Olympic event and beats the qualifying time, they get selected. Where it gets somewhat harder is in the qualifying times themselves. These have been set as the world ranked 6th time from 2022, 2 per nation, at the cut-off point when the policy was finalised. There are three apparent exceptions to this rule, in the women’s 100 backstroke where the time quoted does not appear in the 2022 World Aquatics rankings, but would sit about 7th, the men’s 800m freestyle which is 8th and perhaps more surprisingly the men’s 200 freestyle where the automatic QT was ranked 4th in the world for 2022. These could probably be a result of the vagaries of the specific lists that British Swimming were working from, but regardless, it’s far from easy, with five of the qualifying times also being faster than the current British Record in the same event.

Indeed, going off the 2022 rankings for GB swimmers, not a single woman made the times, while only 7 men did achieve them, although only 6 spots would be taken since two, Adam Peaty and James Wilby, were in the 100m breaststroke. This is summarised on the table below with the times faster than the British Record highlighted red.

Women’s QT2022 QualifiersEventMen’s QT2022 Qualifiers
0:24.38050 Freestyle0:21.571
0:52.980100 Freestyle0:47.600
1:55.860200 Freestyle1:45.011
4:02.160400 Freestyle3:44.060
8:19.000800 Freestyle7:45.320
15:56.8601500 Freestyle14:48.530
0:58.950100 Backstroke0:52.580
2:07.290200 Backstroke1:56.051
1:05.970100 Breaststroke0:58.932
2:22.880200 Breaststroke2:08.110
0:56.410100 Butterfly0:50.880
2:06.810200 Butterfly01:54.220
2:10.220200 IM1:56.221
4:36.000400 IM4:09.181

All indications are, therefore, that we should expect a skeleton team to book their places automatically in this phase of selection

Olympic Champion Tom Dean is one of only 7 men to hit the World Championships QT in 2022. Pic: Speedo/Simone Castrovillari

Discretion

Having filled (or more likely not filled) spaces from the automatic qualifiers, the NPD and Head Coach have discretion to pick up to 8 more swimmers for the team. There are no fixed criteria here, so it’s entirely up to them who gets to go, but the policy does indicate that they will use the third criteria to assist in their deliberations.

Consideration times and relays

If spaces remain at this point (and frankly it would be a major surprise if the team was anywhere near 30 by now) then the team gets filled up by performances measured against a set of consideration times. The top 2 finishers in each event, plus relay teams made up from final performances, get ranked by percentage inside those times, and then those at the top get picked. If you’re outside the consideration times, then that’s it, unless discretion or exceptional circumstances (also determined by discretion) are or have been employed by the selectors.

The mixed medley is not picked directly, unless neither the men’s or women’s medley relay teams qualify whereupon the fastest combination is considered. The other relay oddity that persists is that qualification is based on the top 4 relevant finishers at trials, but those 4 aren’t guaranteed selection, although it’s hard to see a situation where that happens.

The consideration times themselves are something of a mixed bag and it’s not entirely clear how they have been determined. For women, they range between 0.3% and 1.47% above the QTs while the men’s times are 0.34% to 1.53% over, with FINA points varying from 877 to 931 for women and 876 to 944 for men. The 2022 world rankings of the times are similarly varied.

What do the 2022 GB rankings tell us though? It is still a relatively modest outcome when compared to the consideration times – for individual events only 7 women’s spots would be filled (a number which includes the now retired Molly Renshaw) and an extra 11 men’s spots are taken on top of the automatic qualifiers. The relays are likely to boost this figure and the team could hence get close to the maximum when the discretionary picks are factored in.

Women’s CT2022 QualifiersEventMen’s CT2022 Qualifiers
0:24.65150 Freestyle0:21.852
0:53.551100 Freestyle0:48.052
1:56.851200 Freestyle1:45.992
4:04.920400 Freestyle3:46.340
8:26.340800 Freestyle7:49.070
16:01.4601500 Freestyle14:54.521
0:59.651100 Backstroke0:53.320
2:08.070200 Backstroke1:56.602
1:06.421100 Breaststroke0:59.162
2:23.310200 Breaststroke2:08.550
0:56.810100 Butterfly0:51.562
2:07.911200 Butterfly1:55.331
2:10.981200 IM01:57.612
4:37.960400 IM04:13.001

Team Size Context

There has been some coverage in the media recently about how British Athletics will be following a similar strategy to that employed by British Swimming and selecting smaller teams against harder standards, to quite a lot of grumbling. On the face of it selection policies like this one do contribute to that view, but does the reality bear it out? If we consider the size of teams picked for Olympics and World Championships over the past 23 years, when this approach was employed first by Bill Sweetenham and then by Bill Furniss and Chris Spice, with a period in between where Michael Scott and Dennis Pursley notionally had a more open approach, then the answer is ‘partly’.

Certainly, the Scott/Pursley era saw generally larger teams, but the differences are small and are to some extent skewed by the increase in funding ahead of the 2012 Olympics which saw big teams sent to Shanghai and then to London, but these two events are outliers, as is the 2005 World Championship which saw the smallest team in recent memory, with just 18 swimmers making the trip to Montreal. Exceptional circumstances could also be cited for the 23 that made the trip to Budapest 2022 at the last minute.

Generally the team size has fluctuated between 25 and 33 and has been pretty consistent in that range, but it does appear that the sizes have tended to the smaller end of that range since 2013 with 4 of the 7 teams smaller than 30 coming in this period. The current average though is similar to the Sweetenham regime, even accounting for the small team last year.

British team sizes at Olympics and World Championships since 2000. The average team size for each of the NPD/Head Coach regimes is shown dashed in orange. (Click to Enlarge)

What has probably changed more is the way the teams are put together – under previous regimes, while qualifying times may have been similarly tough, there tended to be 2 or even 3 opportunities to make them and limited application of discretion. Spice and Furniss have gone the other way with tough times, one chance to get them, and a large chunk of discretion at their disposal, and the team size does seem to be exhibiting a downward trend as a result.

While results have to a large extent borne this strategy out over the last 10 years, with improved medal returns, we may start to see in the coming years whether that was a result of high selection expectations or just a “golden generation” of swimmers arriving close together.

For 2023 at least, we can hope for a big team, and for them to win a hatful of medals in Fukuoka, but the first of those hopes looks very much in jeopardy. Everyone will arrive at Ponds Forge off the back of a full taper, and it looks very much like they will all need it.

Banner Image: British Swimming/Georgie Kerr

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