74 Chapter 4 et al., 2019a). The lanes inhibit the interaction with other competitors, resulting in a less interactive competitive environment as is also found in time-trial events. Taken together, coaches could expect to encounter sex- and age-related differences in pacing behavior in adolescent swimmers of the same level of race experience. Additionally, as adolescent athletes get older, they adapt their pacing behavior to fit the characteristics of the task, with male swimmers adopting a more all-out behavior on the 100m and both male and female swimmers adopting a more even distribution of effort in the 200m event. Future performance The findings of the present study provide evidence that the swimmers who perform within 104% of the prevailing world record as adults (i.e., the elite group), exhibit pacing behavior that differentiates them from other adolescent swimmers (i.e., the high-competitive group). It therefore establishes that adequate pacing behavior development is an essential part of the developmental pathway towards elite swimming performance. In the 200m event, the effect of future performance level parallels the effects of age and race experience in both males and females. In other words, swimmers that achieve a higher level of performance in adulthood, exhibited a pacing behavior resembling that of older and more experienced swimmers during adolescence. This is different for the 100m event. Adolescent male swimmers who reach the elite level as an adult, exhibit a pacing behavior that is more resembling the pacing behavior of the older swimmers (all-out pacing behavior) compared to that of their peers who reach the high-competitive level. However, the current findings suggest that more race experience results in a more conservative first 50m in the 100m instead of going more all-out. The underlying mechanism for this converse effect of race experience on pacing behavior in 100m event remains unclear and warrants further research. In females no effect of either performance level or age was found, however the effect of race experience was equal to males. In the present study, no distinction could be made between elite and sub-elite swimmers. A possible reason for this could be the high performance level of all included swimmers in the present study. To place it into context, for a male 200m swimmer competing in 2022, the performance levels equal a time of <106.18s (elite), 106.18-109.75s (sub-elite) and 109.75118.93 (high-competitive). The Olympic Qualifying Time for Tokyo 2021 was set at 107.02s (FINA, 2021). In comparison to the current study, a previous study did report a difference in pacing behavior between three performance levels (Wiersma et al., 2017). However, Wiersma et al. (2017) determined adult performance using the season best performance at 18-19 years of age, whereas the present study used a more appropriate measure to indicate adult performance level: all-time peak performance after 20 (female) or 22 (male) years of age expressed as a percentage of the prevailing world record. Recalculating the performance level of the athletes in the previous study, using these methods results in a much wider spectrum of performance (elite: 113.8%, sub-elite: 120.6%, non-elite: 129.7%), could explain
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