Olympic Swimming Will Look Much Different With 50-Meter Events in 2028
The unexpected news will reverberate throughout the sport, with many swimmers surely adjusting their long-range training plans and even career plans. The 50-meter events of butterfly, backstroke and breaststroke are no longer second-class races, having been added to the Olympic program alongside their 100 and 200-meter counterparts.
The events have been part of the World Championships program since 2001,and World Aquatics has been pushing their inclusion in the Olympics for years. The 50s were considered for inclusion in 2017, but the International Olympic Committee opted for additional distance freestyle events, the men’s 800 and women’s 1500, along with the mixed 400 medley relay. Now, the sprinters get their turn at additional medal opportunities.
A pair of 31-year-olds who have already achieved Hall-of-Fame careers are among the main beneficiaries. Adam Peaty has indicated the event change will provide enough motivation to continue his career through the 2028 Games and seek to become the inaugural gold medalist in the 50 breast. Sarah Sjostrom is taking the year off as she is expecting her first child, but a return to competition would give her a chance to swim an Olympic final of the 50 fly, a race in which she is the six-time defending world champion. They are surely not the only swimmers for whom this announcement will tilt the scales away from retirement.
Caeleb Dressel — Photo Courtesy: Peter H. Bick
If Caeleb Dressel wants to go even more sprint-centric in the twilight of his career, he can concentrate on the 50 free and 50 fly while likely remaining a force on relays. All four individual medals Michael Andrew has captured at the long course version of the World Championships have come in 50-meter races covering three different strokes, and Andrew reacted to Wednesday’s news accordingly: “Today marks the greatest day of my sporting career,” he wrote in an Instagram post.
Swimmers including Lithuania’s Ruta Meilutyte, Italy’s Benedetta Pilato, the United States’ Hunter Armstrong, Poland’s Ksawery Masiuk and Australians Isaac Cooper and Sam Williamson are among those whose greatest successes have come in the 50-meter events in their respective strokes. They have reason to celebrate this news, as do swimmers so dominant in their respective strokes that they could sweep or win medals in all three events, as Australia’s Kaylee McKeown (women’s backstroke) and China’s Qin Haiyang (breaststroke) did at the 2023 World Championships.
That said, the additional events at the Olympics will devalue each medal. The feat of winning five individual gold medals, as Michael Phelps did at the 2008 Games, would be slightly less impressive if the swimming program included 17 individual events per gender rather than 13 on the program back in 2008. Two decades later, 51 total individual medals per gender will be distributed in Los Angeles.
Among the other winners, the entire continent of Europe, where the 50-meter races have been considered full-fledged events and contested regularly for years despite not having a place on the Olympic program. European swimmers are used to focusing on sprint races, sometimes to the detriment of those with Olympic-medal hopes, but that is no longer the case.
However, a tough transition could be coming for the United States, the long-dominant nation in women’s swimming but currently on the heels of a significant drop-off for the men’s team in particular at the Paris Olympics. American stroke specialists have still done well in the 50-meter events at World Championships, but that’s in spite of a complete neglect of those events at domestic competitions.
Very few meets in the U.S. include the 50 fly, back or breast once swimmers reach 13 years old. American selection meets include 50-meter races, but only one swimmer per event has been traditionally selected for international competitions instead of two in other events. Selection procedures in 2023 actually prioritized relay alternates over 50-meter winners, which resulted in the sixth-place finishers in the 100 and 200 free receiving the final nods for the Worlds roster at the expense of the 50 fly winner who had not qualified in any other event. That aforementioned 50 fly winner? Andrew.
These new event additions will also pose challenges for roster construction at major international competitions. Typically, each nation may bring 26 women and 26 men to an Olympics or World Championships, and if that limit remains while taking two per event in the 50s, swimmers who might otherwise qualify for major meets as relay alternates will be left behind. The country most impacted by this would be the United States, which has already had to leave Ryan Held off the Tokyo Olympic team and Andrew off the Worlds team two years later. In 2024, sixth-place finishers Blake Pieroni and Matt King did not have their spots in Paris guaranteed until the final day of Olympic Trials.
It’s clear that work remains for the swimming world to adapt to the new reality of 50s as Olympic events, with the steepest learning curve awaiting USA Swimming and its tendency to disregard the one-lap races outside of freestyle. But the pluses outweigh the drawbacks, if only for the simple truth that sprints bring excitement to the sport that the longer races lack.
Traditionalists love watching the strategy involved in a tight 800 or 1500-meter clash, but those races will never have the energy or excitement present on the deck for a one-lap dash. The American swimming hierarchy must make adjustments to the new reality of Olympic competition, but the 38,000 fans of largely U.S. origin set to fill SoFi Stadium at the LA Games will eagerly anticipate these new quick chances at glory.
