TITLE:
Who Was “z-Best” Swimmer in the Paris 2024 Olympics?
AUTHORS:
Kate A. Wohl, Paul M. Sommers
KEYWORDS:
2024 Summer Olympics, z-Scores, Best Swimming Performance
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.14 No.5,
May
21,
2026
ABSTRACT: The authors examine performances in swimming events during the 2024 Paris Olympics with the purpose of discovering the most dominant male and female swimmer. By standardizing performances using a z-score (the number of standard deviations from the average performance in the finals of each swimming event), winners were compared among fourteen men’s and fourteen women’s swimming events. The most dominant male swimmer (with the highest z-score, calculated with or without the last place finisher) was not Frenchman Léon Marchand, but rather Chinese swimmer Pan Zhanle. The most dominant female swimmer was not American Katie Ledecky, but Sweden’s Sarah Sj?str?m (with the highest z-score calculated with the last place finisher) or Canada’s Summer McIntosh (with the highest z-score calculated without the last place finisher).