PARIS: Japanese swimmers have been struggling at the recent Olympics, with a silver in the men’s 400-meter individual medley relay being the only medal the country clinched in swimming at the 2024 Paris Summer Games, the worst performance since the turn of the century.

The country’s woes in the pool have been attributed to failures in its training system and lack of preparation due to inadequate information gathering.

Japanese national swimming team head coach Norimasa Hirai, who had been at the center of training efforts since after the 2008 Beijing Games, stepped down after the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 and was succeeded by Takayuki Umehara. The change presented difficulties passing on know-how and making improvements in the team.

After failing to net even a single medal at the 1996 Atlanta Games, Team Japan entered a golden era with capable swimmers who were gathered from qualifying meets and retrained over about 100 days.

In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic made the country unable to maintain its basic strategy of using team training to strengthen swimmers. With Japanese swimmers battling against larger, more powerful foreign swimmers by working on their techniques, this was a significant blow.

But foreign opponents at the Paris Games were not particularly formidable, with only two world records broken in individual categories. Even amid training difficulties, Japanese athletes would have been able to mount podiums had they performed at personal best levels.

Japanese swimmers were unable to reach their best at Paris due to inadequate preparations, exemplified by confusion regarding the pool depth.

Recent large-scale swim meets typically utilize pools that are 3 meters deep, but the pool used in the Paris Games is only 2.2 meters deep. A shallow pool can make athletes feel more affected by waves caused by other swimmers.

Some Japanese Olympic swimmers first learned about the unusual depth after entering the pool on the first day of on-site practice. While the pool depth information was said to have been distributed in June, one senior Japanese training official did not know about it until a training camp in mid-July, right before the start of the Games.

The fact that Team Japan had low awareness of the need to actively seek out such basic information and prepare themselves may have cost them medals.

JIJI Press