Alright, so a stat I've compiled on Swimming (hand compiled so I may be missing athletes or made other mistakes):
Here are the leaders in individual (non-relay) freestyle medals historically by gender:
Men's:
1. Gary Hall Jr. 5
(tie) Aleksandr Popov 5
(tie) Pieter van den Hoogenband 5
(tie) Ian Thorpe 5
(tie) Sun Yang 5
Women's:
1. Katie Ledecky 10
2. Ariarne Titmus 6
3. Sarah Sjostrom 5
And if we do it just by Golds combining the genders:
1. Katie Ledecky 8
2. Aleksander Popov 4
(tie) 13 tied at 3
For those who've missed any of my previous rants. Why do I focus on freestyle? Because from my understanding there's only one useful stroke for expert swimmers: The front crawl, which now gets called "freestyle" simply because you'd be a fool to swim any other way. The other stroke events exist largely because of European bias. Europeans came up with the breaststroke. Indigenous people came up with the front crawl. And so rather than culling the use of the useless breaststroke, they started having multiple swimming events.
But if we're just asking about who is actually best at swimming fast, don't bother with anything but the front crawl.
And we can see that Ledecky is by far the leader. Obviously, she's a woman and so it certainly makes sense to be reluctant to simply call her the GOAT swimmer, but I think she's pretty clearly the GOAT female swimmer.
Among the men we can see that there's never really been a clear cut stand out. If forced to pick on from these stats it would be Popov, but the sport of men's swimming is just waiting for an outlier talent to emerge analogous to Ledecky.
And no, Phelps wasn't that guy. Phelps won 2 total individual medals in freestyle, and only 1 gold. What Phelps excelled at was in being the best at useless strokes. The world of swimming, because of their massive amounts of unnecessary swimming medals, has anointed him as their GOAT, and they get to do that.
But when we compare athletes from different sports, we should hold on to our wallet when Phelps is talked about as if he's a bigger outlier within his sport than anyone else is in theirs.
Alright,
/rant
