Was it a lot of seasoned pros, or was it mainly the US coach? (I am not sure on this ... )
In any case, I feel a lot of the specific criticism tossed around in the media has been shoddy. For example, her 7-second improvement in the event from 13 months ago to now. Is it extremely unusual for an athlete to be making strides from age 15, to age 16?
And the suggestion that her faster split in the final lap than Lochte was very unusual. Lochte blew her out overall, by a full 23 seconds. She didn't come anywhere close to what Lochte did. As for his final 50, the fact that she beat him is a nice thing she can boast about, but it shouldn't be meaningful or eyebrow-raising. It's only a split, and
Lochte eased up in the final two legs by his own admission, because "I kept looking at the scoreboard. I guess that slowed me down." He was on his way to challenging the WR before tailing off at the end. So, why should her charging finish be compared with a mediocre one from Lochte, just because his first 300-plus meters were superlative?
I think that this article in
Nature (
link) is great for this discussion on a number of levels. I think the featured comment and Editor's response following the article are very worth reading. I think the takeaway, overall, is that number-crunching can be used as a great tool to characterize anomalous performances, but it's difficult to know where to draw the distinction between "anomalous and extraordinary" and "anomalous and
too extraordinary." Every amazing performance is of course anomalous, or they would happen regularly. How many swimmers take 8 golds in one Olympics, as Phelps did? How many runners sweep the 100 and 200 in two consecutive Olympics, as Usain Bolt did (sometimes goofing off in the finishing stretches)?
-in this case, I would say so far nothing other than casual, fairly careless and superficial numbers have come out for it, which makes it almost irresponsible, in my opinion, to claim any basis for characterizing the result as suspicious. I feel that super performances like these are what should be most celebrated in the Olympics, and they often are. But you're right that in this day and age, you can't help but acknowledge that tainting and cheating has been everywhere.
More food for thought, from British former decathlete Dean Macey, on tossing around direct accusations purely on the basis of perforamnce:
link
