As a take home message:
- The aim was to compare the race strategy by the gold and silver medalists in the Women’s 200m butterfly event at Rio 2016.
- In this final, the turns and the swim stroke coordination played major roles in the race strategy setup by each medalist.
- Almost similar performances (a difference of only 0.03s in the official race time) were underpinned by different race strategies.
Practitioners, support staff and researchers are aware that there different ways to reach a given performance. A long time ago, the advice would be to find the ideal biomechanical model (i.e. technique) and race strategy that could be employed by everyone. Nowadays, this approach is unacceptable. These days, swim techniques (starts, turns, swim strokes), and race strategies are customized to the strongest and not-so-strongest features of a swimmer. Indeed, “one size does not fit all”.
A good way to showcase this is analysing the Women’s 200m Butterfly final at Rio 2016. The time difference between the gold (Mireia Belmonte Garcia, ESP) and silver (Madeline Groves, AUS) medalists was only 0.03s. Yet, these two amazing swimmers showed different race strategies, according to their strongest points.
Without further ado, let’s go straight to the highlights of this final:
- Madeline leads the race till the 150th m mark (Fig. 1)
- She kept the time gap between 1.04s (65th m mark) and 0.06s (100th m mark)
- Mireia Belmonte Garcia attacks during turn #3, building a gap up to 0.36s in the 175th m mark
- Turns #2 and #3 were key-moments for the Spaniard to bridge the gap and overtake the Aussie. Over turn #2 she narrows the distance. In turn #3 she overtakes Madeline. Mireia Belmonte Garcia performed three more dolphin kicks than in the previous turn, the main reason she was able to push ahead.
- It seems the Spaniard was saving some energy in the first 65-75m aiming to have fuel in the tank for the last meters of the race. Amid the factors to take into account are the stroke length and stroke index (stroke mechanics) besides the Strouhal number (dolphin kick mechanics). Both may have helped to save energy, having a higher swim efficiency in the first laps of the race. Her regular stroke and kick tempo within each cycle shifted from a strong kick plus a soft kick in the first 150m of the race to two strong kicks over the last lap. She starts easy and smooth and ends strong, having a progressive increase of the pace.
- Fig. 2 confirms that Mireia was faster in turns #2 and #3, despite Madeline having a better first turn. That allowed her to put some distance to remaining contenders and lead the race.
- Mireia Belmonte Garcia had to progressively work harder, showing a faster swims stroke in laps #2 and #3 than the Aussie (Fig 3). As noted earlier, the second down kick is a strategy the Spaniard uses to shift one gear up needing to increase the pace.
- Mireia Belmonte Garcia was able to do it, keeping a very consistent SR of 53-54 cycles/min for the entire event. Her SL decreased slightly over the course of the 200-m fly (Fig 4).
- As far as Madeline is concern, Fig 4 portraits the typical trade-off between SR and SL over this event.
- However, the impairment of the SL is higher in the Aussie (0.28cm) than the Spaniard (0.20cm) counterpart.
- Madeline showed a strong beginning of the race and a remarkable strong finish, challenging Mireia’s swim speed. Mireia sensing the threat by the 185th m mark may have disregarded the need of adjusting the SL in the last few meters of the event to have a clean finish.
- The SR in the last 5m of the event (195-200m) was 54.2 c/min and 54.9 c/min; whereas the SL was 1.71m and 1.80m for Mireia and Madeline, respectively. With a couple of strokes Madeline narrows the gap from 0.20s to just 0.03s. A good finish by Madeline, a tight finish by Mireia.
To be fair, Madeline’s race strategy was employed by Katinka Hosszu (HUN) early on at the Doha 2014 SCM Worlds. Mireia has a very strong finish, increasing progressively the pace over the 200m. The strategy of going fast in the first part of the race building a gap and expecting to keep the momentum coming home is the common ground between Madeline and Katinka. However, Mireia outperformed yet again.
By Tiago M. Barbosa PhD degree recipient in Sport Sciences and faculty at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore & Raul Arellano professor at the University of Granada, Spain
The post Race Analysis: Mireia Belmonte Garcia (ESP, gold) and Madeline Groves (AUS, silver) in the W200Fly at Rio 2016 appeared first on Swimming Science.
