Swimming at 2024 Paris Olympics: Scoring rules, format and path to medal

With the 2024 Paris Olympics heading our way soon, it might be a good time to go over the rules, formats and paths that athletes need to take care of in different sporting events.

In this piece, we take a look at swimming, in which India has a minuscule contingent of merely two athletes - Srihari Nataraj and Dhinidhi Desinghu.

Srihari, who was a part of the 2018 and 2022 Commonwealth Games as well as the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, will take part in the 100m backstroke event for men while the fourteen-year-old Dhinidhi will participate in the women's 200m freestyle.

Swimming has been present at every Olympic Games of the modern era, which says a lot about the history of the sport.

Although swimmers competed in the Bay of Zea at the Athens 1896 Olympic Games, since the 1908 Games in London, the events have taken place in a pool, eliminating the use of natural environments due to safety concerns.

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Rules of the sport

In the Olympic Games, swimming events are held in a pool that measures 50 metres in length.

Events are conducted in four categories - freestyle, breaststroke, butterfly and front crawl - along with a fifth, called medley, which involves all the four categories mentioned above.

Swimmers switch in the medley competition as it involves all four strokes mentioned earlier. The distances also change from event to event, starting from 50 metres and going up to 1500 metres.

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Format and path to medal

The format of the swimming events in the Olympics is pretty simple, with participants taking part in the initial round called the heats at first, and then moving on to the semifinals and finals.

Needless to say, only those who qualify for the semifinals move out of the heats, where most participants are filtered out. India will hope that someone from their contingent manages to at least reach the podium.

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