Propulsion Swimming Podcast · Propulsion Swimming

What is the Greatest Swim of ALL TIME?!

·44 min·3 clips

Leisack’s 46-point anchor turned a race everyone thought France would win into a Beijing shock.

They open by asking what the greatest swim of all time actually is. From there, they widen the field across eras: Beijing-era Phelps races, newer world records from Summer McIntosh and Lio Marchand, and even a super-suit swim that still stands to this day. The top-10 format gives the discussion a clear spine, but the real pull is the argument inside the ranking. The hosts keep testing whether dominance matters more than race drama. One Phelps race lands at number four in their list, and they say it helped push another swimmer into the conversation as one of the best of all time. The turns matter a lot here. Phelps's usual underwater standard makes the comparison sharper, especially when they note how he was out-turned on every turn. They also keep coming back to how close the win was, down to a tenth or two. Then they shift to the Ledecky 800 free battle. They treat that race like a pressure cooker. Part of the case is recency bias, but part of it is the weight Ledecky carried before the start. They talk through the doubts hanging over the swim and how relieved and exhausted she looked after the finish. Across the whole discussion, the hosts keep turning race details into bigger claims about greatness. The result is a fast, opinionated tour through swimming history that still feels grounded in the actual races.

As heard by us

A top-10 swim debate that stays on the races themselves.

Propulsion Swimming Podcast takes on an old argument: which swim deserves the GOAT label. It moves from Phelps' Beijing race to recent world-record swims by Summer McIntosh and Lio Marchand, and it even leaves room for a super-suit effort that still hangs around in the sport's…

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Press play for a top-10 greatest-swims debate with real bite.

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