Two years ago, The Wife and I traveled to Italy for our first FINA World Masters Championships. In the first week of August, we’ll be traveling to Montreal for our second. Not long ago, the seed times [men, women] for all the 5,771 swimmers entered in the meet were published. If these were race results, The Wife would be the one to hover over the numbers and carefully consider each line. Before the race, though, I’m the only one that’s interested. With a few turns through an Excel pivot table, there’s actually some interesting things to see. Just like last year, the meet is dominated by swimmers from the host country. This is impressive, though, when you consider that Canada has only a little more than half the population of Italy and they still are able to outnumber the American athletes. All told, almost half of all the swimmers are coming from north of the Rio Grande and the rest of the Western Hemisphere pushes the ratio almost up to 2/3. With 490 swimmers, France has the third most swimmers, while Brazil & Japan lead their own continents with 195 & 172 athletes, receptively.

Each swimmer is allowed to compete in no more than five individual events (4 relays are also allowed, if your team has enough swimmers in attendance). I contented myself with 4 of the shortest (50 & 100 meters of both freestyle and butterfly), but a plurality of the athletes maxed out their schedule. You might think that travelling a long way to swim might be a factor in such a decision, but it’s not so simple. Canada averaged 3.5 events per swimmer. Mexico and Costa Rica had even higher averages at 3.13 & 4.28. The 66 swimmers coming all the way from India, though, will swim only 1.86 events each. Mongolia and China are even more focused with 1.79 and 1.27 events on average.



If you consider each team individually, fully 51% of them are represented, in Montreal, by a single swimmer. Only a quarter of the teams have more than 3 people. Still those teams of 4 or more make up two thirds of the meet’s total population. In fact about 1/6 of all swimmers are on a team larger than 30. New England Masters Swim Club will have 158 swimmers competing this year.

Masters swimmers are required to be 25 years old by the end of the year. The oldest person competing in Montreal is a 97-year old Kiwi woman named Katherine. Age groups are split into 5-year spans and the 50- to 54-year-olds are best represented with 774 competitors. More interesting, though is the drop in participation just before that age. As the oldest members of their age group, only 130 49-year-olds are attending. That’s 29% fewer than the 184 50-year-olds at the bottom of their new age group. In all, there are 1,356 competitors in the first year of their age group and only 1,032 in their last.

When looking at the next graph, it’s important to consider that we’re looking at self-reported seed times. The idea here is to let FINA know exactly how fast you are capable of swimming. Ideally, this would be done by reporting a race result that you have achieved in the past. Now, if everyone reported race results (down to the hundredth of a second), it would be safe to assume that the final digit would be essentially random-all ten digits would show up an equal amount of the time.

And, in fact, 1-9 are all equally represented in the seed times. The pie chart, though, shows that more than half of all seed times had to have been estimates. Two years ago, there were a fair number of swimmers that couldn’t even swim fast enough to match the entry threshold-we tended to blame imaginary seed times. As we guessed 2 years ago, there is some variation among who is making these guesses. There’s not any real rhyme or reason here, except that there does seem to be consistency within a given team as to whether they guess their seed or look it up. My favorite find has been the contingent from Belarus: every seed time was a guess rounded to the half second and every seed time places the swimmer in the fastest heat of each event. Will Montreal be awash in Belarussian medals? We shall see.

We’re looking forward to our trip and hoping to pull out some fast times. We’ll do our best to post photos here afterwards, but if the past holds any patterns, I wouldn’t hold your breath (yes, that’s a swimming pun).