19 Performance development of top-elite swimmers 2 Introduction In the context of athlete development, the increase of sport performance of a youth athlete aiming to make it to the top is key (Ericsson et al., 1993). In a relatively short time, young athletes will have to continue improving their sport performance to reach excellence (Ericsson et al., 1993; Wiersma, 2000; Elferink-Gemser et al., 2011). Knowledge about general performance development of those who have made it to the top could provide important information for athletes, coaches and federations (Allen et al., 2014). A thorough understanding of performance development during an athlete’s career could facilitate the identification and development of talented athletes and could enable sport federations to target their support towards those athletes who have the greatest potential to make it to the top (Durand-Bush & Salmela, 2002). A fitting sport to investigate the performance development of youth athletes on their way to the top is competitive swimming. Competitive swimming is a time trial sport in which a swimmer tries to travel a certain distance in the water as fast as possible. It is a popular global sport with a high level of competition in which the gap between the gold medalist and the last finisher in international competition is constantly decreasing (Stanula et al.,2012). The key distance in competitive swimming is the 100m freestyle long course event, which has been on every Olympic program since 1904 (men) and 1912 (women). In this event, competition starts from an early age on and the competition level is high for both male and female swimmers (Swimrankings, 2018; FINA, 2018). Due to technological progressions like electronic timekeeping and online accessible repeated-measures competition data, retrospective studies on performance data of swimmers in the 100m freestyle event offer great opportunities to provide new insights for performance development in competitive swimming. The time-captured nature of competitive swimming comes with a strong emphasis on swim performance from a young age on. In practice, this is marked by the early selection of the fastest youth swimmers into athlete development programs based on their competitive performance times (KNZB, 2018). The underlying assumption behind this approach is that future winners can be identified on the basis of their junior swim performance (Baker et al., 2018). In this way, swim performance from a young age on is highly valued and considered as a serious predictor of success (KNZB, 2018). Nevertheless, the utility of talent identification on the basis of performance at early ages has been questioned by several researchers (Elferink-Gemser et al., 2011; Gulbin et al., 2013; Vaeyens et al., 2008; Règnier & Salmela, 1993). Specific for competitive swimming, research from Barreiros et al. (2014) has shown that the conversion rates of junior elite swimmers into senior elite swimmers are generally low. Moreover, one of the concerns of using this approach is the fixed focus on the swimmer’s current performance level
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