Point System of Swimming

I wanted to briefly describe something about swimming in Austria. I had my 4^th swim meet yesterday, the 3^rd meet in a series which make up the Steiermark Winter Cup. The first meet back in November was the 400 free, the second meet was 200’s, the meet yesterday was 100’s, and the 50’s will be in a few weeks. Anyways, the points from each meet get totaled up and at the end the medals are given out. What I wanted to explain is how the point system works. I had never heard of this before in America but apparently, this is the FINA international point system. Instead of 1^st place getting 9 points and so on (like in the US), every swimmer gets points regardless of their place in the event. 1000 points is if you break a world record and depending how close your time is to the world record of that event, you get the allotted number of points on that scale (of 0-1000 points). What this means is that the freestyle events naturally get more points because the times are naturally closer to the world record. In the swim meet yesterday I swam the 100 fly and 100 breast. I won both events, getting first place in both. BUT, because of how the points are weighted, I ended up getting 5^th place overall because the top 4 finishers above me all swam freestyle. I found this to be quite unfair because had the points been weighted like USA swimming does it, I would have won that meet.

That was just something I wanted to mention. Hope that made sense…