Team Trophies: Eagles Ahead As Dolphins Leap At Their Wings & The Rest Of The Best Close In
SOS had devoted January coverage to our 2024 awards and review of the year gone by. Here's our State of Swimming glimpse back at what Olympic year showed us when it came to team trends. Which nations made progress since Rio 2016 - and which found the going got tougher
In 2024, the USA swim team had its most challenging year in the Olympic pool since the dark days of the GDR in the 1980s.
Doping controversy was not exactly missing from the mix as Paris hosted the Games last July and August but there was much more to a trend that ended with Team USA, while still on top, taking home fewer than 10 gold medals for the first time since the last Olympics to feature East German, in 1988, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the GDR and German reunification.
The Seoul Games, in fact, resulted in the GDR topping the medals table with 11 gold, the USA on 8, the latter the same count with which Americans led the medals table in 2024 by one gold over Australia.
And all of that unfolded with three more events on the Olympic program than all the Games between 1988 and 2016.
Taking a small thread of a much larger body of work on swimming history and trends, below our Team Trophies, I offer an imperfect yet instructive snapshot of a significant shift in power in the pool.
First up, our Team Trophies for 2024 before the tables that show a big shift in pool power.
