Swimming Race Correlation Statistics

I was curious about which swim events were the most closely correlated after some teammates and I had a debate about the weirdest specialty combo (I thought it was sprint free and 200 back). So I scraped some data from Swimcloud and ran the numbers. I pulled my numbers from the top ranked male swimmers in the class of 2025 on Swimcloud, and ended up with a sample size of n=1063. I then categorized these swimmers by their best event, and counted the number of occurances of an event in their 2nd-4th best events. Divide this by the total number of swimmers with that best event, and you have the correlations. The scripts I used to collect the data and create the correlations can be found here.

The most surprising data I found was 100 back/100 breast, which has no overlap at all, despite both of those being sprint events. Also, there's not a single top ranked swimmer who's good at both sprint and distance free, which I found surprising, because I figured at least one swimmer would be something of an all purpose freestyler.

To answer the question, though, the weirdest specialty combo that does exist is the 100 breast best event + 1000 free as another good event. These are not only the two most different styles of swimming, but one is a complete sprint and the other is pure distance, making this a really strange combination. Only one swimmer had this combo, and I think he, whoever he is, deserves the crown for weirdest specialty combo in swimming

Search for an event to see it's data