Evolution Olympic Swimming Gold Medal Times from 1912–2024
Watching 22-year-old French swimmer Léon Marchand crush numerous records in the 2024 Paris Olympics was a snapshot of the evolution of the modern athlete. Improvements in sports medicine and health science, and the increase in the access to sports (or rather the decreases in segregation in sports) have all contributed to the smashing of records across all team and individual sports. Swimming is a example to examine further, simply because it has a long history in the Olympics. We have 28 Olympics to draw data from across over 100 years of history – a lot has changed
I found the data for these plots on Kaggle, where someone had nicely collected the Gold winning times for nearly all swimming races from 1912-2020. I just had to add in 2024 by hand and plot the results using Python.
