Precision: What Other Sports Can Learn From Swimming

If objectivity is what you want to see in a professional sport, look no further than swimming. No referees to decide who wins. No judgment calls that are debated for days. One winner is chosen by only one thing: the clock. The system is so exact that races can be decided by margins no other sport could judge cleanly. At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Michael Phelps won the 100m butterfly by 0.01 seconds over Milorad Cavic, a difference the human eye could not reliably see, but one the timing system captured with total precision. No protests. No controversy. Just trust. 

Swimmers know precisely what they need to work on, and fans know the result is definitive. Contrast that to football, basketball, or soccer, where blown calls are the subject of every postgame show and newspaper column. The technology behind swimming is used to measure and track, not to correct human error. It’s fair, and it’s efficient. ​​Precision is also how swimming measures its athletes. Each race is a data point, every hundredth of a second recorded and stored. Swimmers and coaches track splits, stroke rates, start times, and performance trends over entire seasons. Long before analytics took over baseball and basketball, swimming was already built on measurement. Improvement isn’t subjective or philosophical; it’s quantifiable. You get faster, or you don’t.

Swimming also values humility and respect. There’s no trash-talking or taunting at the end of a race. Just athletes shaking hands and waiting for the scoreboard to confirm what they already know. It’s a competition without ego, and the sport enforces that standard. At the 2024 ACC Championships, college swimmer Owen Lloyd was disqualified after winning the 1650-yard freestyle because he climbed into the next lane to celebrate with a teammate before the other swimmers had finished. It wasn’t malicious. It wasn’t disrespectful. But it violated a rule designed to ensure that every athlete gets an uninterrupted, interference-free race. Swimming guards its fairness even after the competition stops.

Of course, some would argue that the drama created by officiating missed calls, arguments, and emotion is part of what makes team sports entertaining. Controversy sells. Debates fuel fan interest. There’s truth to that. But controversy shouldn’t determine outcomes or overshadow performance. Swimming shows that a sport can be compelling because of its precision, not despite it.

This is what the other sports could emulate: less subjectivity, more measurement; less theatrics, more discipline. Football could adopt automated ball-spot technology and standardized sensor-based first-down systems, eliminating some of the guesswork that still shapes critical moments. Soccer could continue expanding goal-line technology and semi-automated offside detection. Basketball could invest further in real-time tracking systems to reduce whistle-dependent interpretation. None of these changes would strip the games of personality; they would simply ensure that the defining moments belong to the athletes, not the officials.

Swimming may not be a ratings leader, but it proves what sports can be when precision, fairness, and performance are prioritized over theatrics and interpretation. If other sports embraced even a fraction of that standard, debates would shift from blown calls to actual achievement. Swimming shows us what competition looks like when truth wins out, when precision isn’t an accessory to the game, but the foundation of it.