Genuine question: why does swimming have so many events in the Olympics...

Genuine question: why does swimming have so many events in the Olympics? It has 34 events which eclipses any other sport except athletics, but that includes track, field and road events (which have 24, 16 and 5 events respectively, not including the heptathlon/decathlon).

Who cares, lad?

Denmark's one handball gold > All 34 golds from Swimming events

Same reason running has so many events

Running has 12 events at 400m or below and half of those are either hurdles or relays. Swimming has 28 events at that distance.

>22 combined speedskating events

It's a good question lad. Rugby isn't represented at the Olympic level despite how it obviously fits in. Only sevens was represented at the last summer olympics, and we haven't had rugby at the olympics in about 100 years. In my high school in burgerland, swimming was "that's a sport?" tier. So I have no idea why swimming has so many god damn events at the Summer Olympics. Doesn't make any sense.

Need something to fill time.

distance isn't apples to apples across the two. though i do believe tehre should be backwards run

There's only one way to run.

the olympics aren't really the best place for major sports - soccer, cricket, rugby, baseball all have bigger international competitions. Even tennis and golf.

There are multiple ways to travel 100m, running, walking, crawling, rolling, cartwheeling, etc. They should all be Olympic events.

would watch 400m bear crawl
would watch 100m roll

That's actually a really good point I hadn't considered. Thanks user.

I'd watch women's 100m crawl. It'd end up being actually fit qts wearing tight aerodynamic suits. Imagine.

Don't forget walking in a handstand.

i agree britbro
i always laugh when someone says michael phelps is the greatest athlete of all time because he has the most medals- it's a stacked deck in his favor
is he the GOAT swimmer? sure, but he gets ten million medals for variations of the same activity.
Think about basketball for a second- there's only one gold medal available. Imagine if there was a medal for 3 point shooting, one for mid range jumpers, one for dunking, one for defense, one for handles, one for rebounding, etc
same with soccer if they had a FK medal, a PK medal, a dribbling medal, a passing medal, a crossing medal, etc

Retarded analogy, individual sports are different from team sports, at least compare swimming to athletics or something

The USA has a huge influence on the Olympic commitee so they try and include as many events where they can win medals as possible. Not even joking.

But swimming isn't even the event we have the most medals in.

So the Dutch influenced the ioc to include shitton of speeedskating?

I'm sure there are others that have gotten gold every time for many Olympics, but he gets 5+ golds every time

I hate Americans as much as the next guy but that's just retarded, ISHYGDB(elive)T

no, because a great athlete like michael jordan or kobe bryant is great at several different things and gets only one medal for it
meanwhile swimmers can get 80 thousand medals
it's rigged in favor of swimming, that's why our medal count is always so high

That doesn't invalidate my point. Athletics is where the USA has won the most medals and that's has the most events out of any sport. Gymnastics is another sport with a ton of events and the USA do well in it, although the events are at least more varied.

Well more events are more fun and alot of sports that we are not good at like fencing, sailing, weightlifting, most skiing and sakting games have shitton events

Nowhere near as many as swimming though, that's the point of this thread. The only other argument I can find is because of the history of the different strokes, but plenty of events have been dropped from past Olympics. Freestyle at various lengths is the only swimming event that needs to be at the Olympics, you'd still end up with about 18 events.

drop some relays too

Keep breast stroke but medley butterfly and backstroke can go.

100m
200m
400m
800m (women)
1500m (men)
4x100m relay
Marathon
Men and women for each event (aside from 800m and 1500m) gives you 12 events. I think that's a good amount.

I'd watch the Olympic 100m wheelchair race.