What if the fastest Olympians in all disciplines competed in the same event? Track cyclists would crush the sprinters. Rowers and canoeists would finish almost neck and neck. A breaststroke swimmer would need six times as long as four relay racers to cover 100 metres.
For comparison, the following graph shows a simulated race lasting 10 seconds: the lines show how many metres the fastest athletes in each Olympic event would cover in that time.
The chart above is based on the times recorded by the medallists in Paris: the distances of the events and the times of the gold medallists have been taken to calculate the average speed of each athlete. In the case of the women’s marathon, which takes place this Sunday, the value of the current Olympic record is used.
Does distance matter? Less than you might think
The weight of distance on speed for Olympic athletes in their respective events seems relative. Among sprinters, 100-meter runners are 0.5% slower than 200-meter runners (10.22 m/s versus 10.27 m/s), who have the advantage of not having to start from a standing start in the second half of the race.
In long distance races, the speed of 10,000m runners (6.2 m/s) is only 18% faster than that of marathon runners (5.5 m/s), even though they cover four times the distance. Someone running the marathon at the pace of the 10,000m would take one hour and 53 minutes instead of the world record of 2 hours and 35 seconds.
The fastest event in athletics is the 4×100-metre relay: athletes benefit from the efficiency of the baton handover, which takes place in the middle of the race, eliminating the first few metres of acceleration required by sprinters in the individual event.
In swimming, the fastest events are freestyle, followed at a distance (and in this order) by butterfly, backstroke and breaststroke. Swimmers in the latter style progress at almost the same speed as those who swim the 10 km in open water, where factors such as water temperature (the warmer the water, the more tiring it is), the strength of the current and the direction in which the swimmer swims also come into play.
