Swim meet scoring is largely standardized. A swimmer’s finishing place in their event earns their team or country a predetermined number of points; perhaps 6 points for 1st, 4 points for 2nd, 3 points for 3rd, 2 points for 4th, and 1 point for 5th (a typical high school dual-meet format).
There can be some variance though, and some elements of creativity too, depending on how specifically the points are distributed. For instance, we often treat the Olympic games as being “scored” via a gold-medal count. This would simply be a system where each country earns 1 point for their swimmer’s 1st place finish, and no points for any other placing.
The International Swimming League (ISL) expanded on the standard point system when they introduced their so-called ‘jackpot’ system for the 2020 season. This still awarded points based on finishing place, but added the additional quirk that the 1st place swimmer could ‘steal’ points from other swimmers if they won the race by a large enough predetermined margin.
The choices of how many points to award each place or whether or not to include a jackpot system both feel consequential, have their various benefits and drawbacks, and both provide a swim league or event-host to express their values through the structure of the competition format. Yet, they’re all largely the same.
Malcolm Gladwell’s idea, however, is a bit different. Now, Malcolm specifically is more of a runner, but during his appearance on Rich Roll’s podcast, he had a very different perspective for how cross-country meets could be scored that we can apply to swimming as well: Instead of awarding somewhat arbitrary points, score by cumulative time. So, for example, if Team A had two runners doing a mile in 5:07, and 5:13 respectively, they would total to 10:20 and beat Team B with runners finishing in 5:00 and 5:30, for a total of 10:30.
So, what if we applied this same concept to swimming? Specifically, I scored Season 3 of the ISL using this format to explore some of the consequences of such a system in an article published on swimswam.com.
Although I highly doubt the ISL (or any current league / governing body) would switch to this system, it was fun to explore and required a lot of interesting programming including scraping xml files for meet results with python, SQL queries to score and summarize, and R+ggplot to create some visuals to help illustrate the consequences of a scoring system like this.