176 Chapter 8 The aim of this thesis was to gain a deeper understanding of the pathway to swimming expertise. Throughout six studies, we examined both swim performance and underlying performance characteristics linked to the swimmer using a longitudinal and multidimensional approach. The results offer a glimpse into the key characteristics and corresponding developmental patterns that distinguish swimmers on track to reach the elite level from their lower-performing peers who, while off track, still attained success at the national level. This revealed two athletic profiles – one for males, and one for females. These athletic profiles, presented in Figure 1 and 2, provide a visual summary of this thesis and set the stage for the upcoming discussion. Beyond contributing to a refined scientific understanding, our findings hold the potential to significantly improve talent identification, selection and development processes in swimming practice. The foundation of the athletic profiles The findings of this thesis, and by extension, the athletic profiles, are grounded in a wellfounded methodology characterized by three specific strengths. These strengths revolve around the definition of performance level groups, which further subdivided talented swimmers into more specific categories, alongside the specific way of data processing throughout the chapters. This approach now allows us to derive valuable insights from the wide range of studies presented in this thesis. Firstly, the criteria for defining performance level groups were directly linked to the elite level, and remained consistent across all chapters. The term “elite level” in this context refers to swimmers whose performance aligns with the fastest 50 swimmers worldwide in their respective event. However, this classification is suitable only when we can reasonably assume that swimmers are close to their age of peak performance, which is typically around the age of 22 for females and 24 for males (Allen et al., 2014). While this condition applied to Chapters 2 through 4 where we investigated established, international senior swimmers, it did not hold for Chapters 5 through 7 where we examined aspiring, national youth swimmers. In the latter case, it is quite likely that these swimmers have not reached their full potential yet. Therefore, in Chapters 5 through 7, we explicitly categorized swimmers as either on track or off track to reach the elite level, relying on benchmarks derived from the performance development of elite swimmers established in Chapter 2. These benchmarks accounted for variations in swimmers’ age, sex and event. Second, the classification of performance level groups did take future achievements into account. That is, swimmers were categorized into performance level groups only after undergoing a critical developmental phase – specifically, after puberty, following the late-junior-to-early-senior transition and at the age of peak performance. This approach contrasts with assigning them based solely on their current performance levels at the time of data collection. Subsequently, we conducted a retrospective analysis of their development
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