What's The Highest FINA Points Swim Ever? The Answer Isn't As Simple As It Sounds

12/31/2024 12:47 PM

By Sophie Kaufman on SwimSwam

Data courtesy of Barry Revzin and Daniel Takata 

The last major international competition of the calendar year—the 2024 Short Course World Championships—saw a bevy of world records broken. And not just broken—records were completely smashed as the likes of Gretchen Walsh, Noe Ponti, and Luke Hobson rewrote the record book.

Ponti scored 1061 points in the men's 50 butterfly final as part of this record barrage, prompting a commenter to ask, "What's the swim that's scored the most FINA points?"

As it turns out, Ponti's swim wasn't even the highest at the meet. Walsh's 100 butterfly and 100 IM final swims earned 1078.2 points. But the question is still worthwhile, even as it reveals a complicated exercise.

FINA points—now called Swimming Points after the World Aquatics rebrand—compare results across different events and swims against the current world record. Swims are valued against a base time defined by World Aquatics annually based on the most recently ratified world record. The faster a swim is compared to the base time, the more points the swimmer earns. (You can read more about the points calculation system on the World Aquatics website.)

Adding another degree of difficulty is the fact that the cut-off dates for base times resetting are August 31st for short-course meters and December 31st for long-course meters.

We don’t actually know when they first started calculating FINA Points swims, or when the current system was set, so all of this is based on what the system is now, applied to other years.

Just tracking long and short-course meters swims, our data experts Barry Revzin and Daniel Takata—who are responsible for all the numbers in this piece—isolated Claire Guttenstein's 1910 long-course 100 freestyle world record performance as the swim that earned the highest point total in history; she earned 1320 points bringing the world down from 1:35 to 1:26. However, in the early 1900s, records fell more easily and in bigger chunks—thus, it was more common to have a staggeringly high score.

With that in mind, our numbers experts set a few cut-off dates. To give records enough time to "settle" after the initial flurry that comes from establishing an event, they decided on 1980 for the 50 freestyle and 1968 for all other events. Considering all events but mixed relays, here are the top 20 highest-earning swims.

Table of Highest-Earning Swims

Note: 1980 cut-off for 50 freestyle, 1986 for all other events. No mixed relays.

One of the key things to remember with this table is that the "base time" that sets the formula for how many points a swim earns only resets annually, not each time the world record gets broken. That's why, in February 1995, Angela Kennedy and Amy Van Dyken both earned such high scores in the event. At the start of the year, the world record stood at 27.54 from 1990—then Van Dyken lowered it to 26.73. But the base time didn't reset when Van Dyken lowered the world record, so when Kennedy took the record less than two weeks later with a 26.56, her points total was higher than Van Dyken's; her swim was measured against the initial world record, not Van Dyken's swim.

Walsh's world records in the 100 butterfly (52.71) and 100 IM (55.11) scored 1078.2 points. Those swims crack the top 20 as a tie for sixteenth. However, if this list only included swims from 2000 on, she'd rocket up to seventh, showcasing how rare a performance like her meet in Budapest has become.

Ulrike Richter, Cameron van der Burgh, and Ed Moses all make the list twice. Richter and Moses' swims are in the same year and the same event—highlighting again that some swims points are as high as they are because of when they were swum, not necessarily because they demolished a world record. However, Van der Burgh's two entries are from the same year but different events. He annihilated the 50 and 100 breaststroke world records in August 2009, wearing a super-suit as he swam 25.43 in the 50 breaststroke and 55.99 in the 100 breaststroke.

Analyzing van der Burgh's times emphasizes one of the quirks in the swimming points system mentioned earlier—the cut-off dates. The base times for short-course meters swims are recalculated on August 31st. Van den Burgh went faster than these times later in the year, swimming 25.25/55.61 in November.

However, by November, the base time had reset to his standard from August, so the swims aren't worth as many points. His 25.25 earned 1021 points but if he'd swum it before the August 31 cut-off, he would've earned 1113 points.

These wrinkles highlight the difficult nature of this exercise. Our numbers experts set their chosen cut-off dates to weed out time from the early 20th century when swimmers hacked seconds off world records as they made simple improvements that made dramatic differences. But, a table with different cut-off dates would yield different results—whether you decided to expand the range to 1900 or limit it to 2000.

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