Then there’s Nicolò Martinenghi of Italy, whose gold-medal time of 59.03 in the 100 breaststroke would not have been good enough to claim a medal of any color at the last two Summer Games. It was the slowest winning performance since Japan’s Kosuke Kitajima two decades ago at the Athens Olympics.
At least one swimming world record has been set at every Olympics in the post-World War II era, and it’s common for multiple marks to fall.
A whopping 23 world records were set at the 2008 Beijing Games, when the sport was in the midst of the rubber-suit revolution. The following year, at the world championships in Rome, a staggering 43 marks were established, leading the world governing body to impose strict new rules governing body coverage and fabrics.
Since then, the pace of world records has returned to more customary levels, with several marks from those 2009 worlds still on the books. But it’s generally assumed that most everyone will be at their best when an Olympic year rolls around, which usually leads to a spirited assault on the record list.
Nine world records were set at London in 2012, eight more fell at the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro, and a half-dozen were broken at the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Games three years ago, when swimmers competed in a mostly empty arena because of COVID-19 restrictions.