Swimming Blogs - Chris DeSantis

As I promised, I’m back from my one-week hiatus. Now that my collegiate season has come to a close I plan on updating the blog more often. I’m going to be taking these articles in a couple new directions that I hope you will enjoy. One of the things I’m going to try and do is take the swimming news of the week and put it in historical context. To the uninitiated, the background on a breaking news story can often take some digging.
One of the biggest stories this week was the war of words between Gary Hall Jr and Eamon Sullivan. Gary, in an interview in the Herald Sun made the following statements about Sullivan’s time drops on the way to breaking the world record in the 50 meter freestyle : "I have been in this sport for a very long time and I have never seen such a drop in time from an elite swimmer. Similar drops have been made by athletes that later were proven cheaters…The public has a right to be suspicious of doping when they see a drop like that.”
Obviously the comments were not well received in the Austalian swimming community. Teammates and coaches, and even Sullivan himself, rose in defense of the performance. Hall, from his own website www.theraceclub.net, stood by his comments completely.
I don’t pretend to know whether Sullivan was doping or not, but I was curious to see whether or not the statement that Hall made had historical validity. In 2007, Eamon Sullivan’s best performance in the 50 was a 22.05. In 2006 he was 22.00. Each of these performances placed him in the world’s top ten for each of those years. This information separates Sullivan from comparison with someone like Michelle Smith-DeBruin. In 1996 Smith completed a meteoric rise with four gold medals in the Atlanta games. In the span of one year she dropped her 400 Meter time from 4:26 to 4:07, a drop of over 7%. Two years later Smith would be caught tampering with her own drug sample and after losing an appeal, retire.
Eamon Sullivan’s drop from his previous best of 22.00 to 21.56 represents a 2% reduction in his best time. A 2% drop for a world class swimmer is extraordinary but not unprecedented. One example from recent history is Ian Crocker. Prior to the 2003 World Championships Crocker had never bettered 52 in the 100 fly. His best time stood at 52.21 entering the meet. He would lower the world record to 50.98. That time drop actually constituted a 2.4% drop in time, greater than Sullivan’s drop.
Several important factors separate the two performances. Sullivan’s performance came at a regional championship, a smaller stage in comparison to Crocker’s pre-olympic year world championship performance. Crocker was, I surmise, shaved and tapered for the meet. Sullivan was, by all accounts, not shaved or tapered, although he admitted to having been limited in his training in the weeks leading up to the meet.
Further research reveals more swim comparable to Sullivan’s. When Mary T. Meagher broke her own world record in the 100 Butterfly in 1981, her time drop from 59.26 to 57.93 represented a 2.2% drop from her previous time. In the same time period that Sullivan dropped .44, Cesar Cielo went from a 2006 best of 22.32 to a 2007 best of 21.84, also a 2% improvement in his best.
The purpose of this article is not to exonerate Sullivan. He doesn’t need exonerating. Nor to put any of these other swimmers careers in question, which they should not be. It is also not my intention to urge silence on a very important discussion promoted by Hall and others in the sport surrounding doping. Hall’s quote merely left me questioning whether Sullivan’s performance was unprecedented, so I went looking for the answer.