I am a swimmer at the Virginia Military Institute, and I have swam since I was about nine years old. Ever since people have found out that I swim, I've been asked questions like, "So are you going to the Olympics?" or, "Are you the next Michael Phelps?" The answer, for 99.99% of swimmers is "No."
The Olympics are not something that's easy to get to, even if you do swim 12 to 18 or more hours a week. I suppose it's because not that many people swim in comparison to sports like football and soccer that we more often get questions like this. But just so we all can understand what it means to be an Olympic swimmer, I'm going to go through this.
In order to go to the Olympics in swimming, a swimmer first has qualify for Olympic Trials. Honestly, this is not the hardest thing, not saying I could do it. Usually there is about 100 swimmers in most events at Trials. The time cuts for NCAA Championships are actually faster than those for Olympic Trials. The next step is an Olympic qualifying time. There are two standards, but for the purpose of this article, it doesn't really matter. Usually between 15 and 20 swimmers in each event at Trials are actually fast enough to meet the Olympic qualifying standards. Lastly, of all swimmers, only the top TWO finishers at each event at Olympic Trials go to the Olympics. For Brazil 2016, Team USA had about 40 swimmers, including the reserve swimmers.
In 2015 there were about 360,000 swimmers registered with USA Swimming. The youngest swimmer at the 2016 games was 13 (from Nepal). There are about 160,000 swimmers registered with USA Swimming ages 13 and older. Being that there are 13 individual events for both men and women, we can estimate that there were 2,600 (26*100) race entries at Trial this summer. Because many of those are swimmers entered in multiple events, we can make a modest estimate that there were about 2,000 swimmers at Trials. So about 1.25% of swimmers ever go to Olympics Trials. Of those 2,000 only 40 or so go to the Olympics, and that is 2% of swimmers at trials and .025% of all age eligible swimmers registered in USA Swimming.
And only 1 swimmer has even been Michael Phelps, so there's only a .025% chance that the next swimmer you talk to will go to the Olympics and pretty much a 0% chance that he or she will be the "next Michael Phelps!"
