Looking at the Relays

With less than 2 weeks until the British Gas ASA National Age Group Championships and the following youth Championships, I decided to take a look at the respective programmes for both events. Scrolling through the programmes, I was drawn to the more fun events of these National championships, the relay events. However, on looking through the list of confirmed qualifiers, I started to wonder on which region would be represented by the most teams. With there only being 30 spots in each relay event in both the Age Group and Youth Nationals, teams can qualify by posting a time that comes in the top 30 of an event at their respective Regional Championships. So a Team that wins a relay event in their region could end up not qualifying as there were multiple teams that came 4th or 5th in another region, who had a faster time. In writing this, there have been 2 teams this year that didn't wualify for an event at Nationals, despite winning that event at their respective Regional Championships. They are South Aberdeenshire from Scotland (Age Groups Boys 4x100 Medley Relay) and Weston Super-mare from the South West (Age Groups girls 4x200 Freestyle Relay). However, there are also many teams that have decided not to swim a relay event at Nationals. Clubs such as Millfield, City Of Cardiff and Swansea have pulled out of more than one event, even if they were in the top 10 qualifiers. After compiling the stats, the results are quite shocking. You can find them at the end of this post.


In a region that is due to hold the 2012 Olympics in just over a years time, London fared as possibly the worst region, when the number of qualifiers are combined for both the Age Group and youth National Championships. Just looking at the relays for the Youth Championships, and out of the 6 relay events and 180 spots, London only managed to secure 11 of them, receivng the worst percentage of the 9 regions for qualifying, with only 22.92% of the teams who participated in the relay events at the London youth Championships able to make it through to compete at the Youth Nationals. Only Scotland had a worse qualifying percentage for the Youth Nationals, with 20.31%, but still managed to get over double the number of qualifiers that London has. The most successful region was the South East, who boast the talents of Plymouth Leander and Millfield who were both able to field multiple teams who qualified for the Youth Nationals. Only 1 London team managed to qualify in the top 3 for an event, Hillingdon in the 4x100m Medley Relay, with the nearest London team almost 7 seconds back.

The London Region didn't fare too well in the ASA Age Group Championships either. They had almost double the amount of qualifiers of Scotland and Wales, 13 teams qualified for the London Region compared to 7 teams apiece from Scotland and Wales. It may look impressive but 4 regions had double the amount of teams qualify that London had, with the North West leading the way with 31 teams qualified. Only Scotland had a worse qualifying percentage than London; Scotland teams had a 6.19% chance of qualifying for the Age group Nationals, while London teams had a much higher 16.05% chance to qualify. The Age groupers managed to go 2 better than the Youth Qualifiers, and get 3 teams into the top 10; Ealing Girls' 4x100 Freestyle Team, Camden Swiss Cottage Girls' 4x100 Medley relay, and Hillingdon Boys' Medley Relay.

Once you look into it, you can see why the London Region has so few qualifiers for the relay events. With the only Olympic-sized pool being the Olympic Pool, that leaves a handful of 50m Pools in the whole region, that can be used for training the whole year round. For a population of almost 8 million people, you would think
that there would be more than the 3 50m pools in the whole city. Crystal Palace, Gurnell Leisure Centre in Ealing, and Hillingdon Leisure centre are the only 3 50m pools in the city. None of which are very fast, and only 1 is a decent facility. Once you get to National level, you can see the quality between those who
regularly train Long Course, and those who primarily train Short Course. With the London Region only being able to occupy 24 of the total 360 relay spaces for the ASA Age Group and Youth Nationals, I can see that number dropping even further if something is not done to help London Region swimmers get more Long Course pool time.

Stats:

Total Stats for Age Groups and Youths:

Region          No. of Teams in Top 30                    No. of Teams in top 10

East                           34                                                           15

London                      24                                                             4

Midlands                    51                                                           19

North East                 50                                                            22

North West                55                                                            26

Scotland                    34                                                              4

South East                 60                                                            10

South West               38                                                             14

Wales                       14                                                               6