Fras,

You certainly do have a point. If Josh Everett had made it to day 2 of the 2009 Games, he would have had a significant advantage on the snatch event. I could try to compare exactly how technique-dependent swimming is relative to olympic lifting, but anything I say would just be a biased opinion and not very supportable.

I will say that I think the olympic lifts are a good measure of power (one of the ten physical skills). The clean and jerk is also the most efficient way to lift things--it is fundamental to human activity on land. What would a swimming event be measuring? I think in practice that, other than technique, it mostly measures cardiorespiratory endurance. You could argue that it also measures stamina, and coordination, but it only measures these with respect to a small set of muscles moving with a very small load in a manner that applies well to virtually nothing else we do.

(This goes back to Coach's statement that cardio does not carry over well across domains. I know this first-hand because I could swim at 80-90% of my capacity for as much as 20-40 minutes at a time...but when I went out to run on a track, I was winded almost immediately.)

Endurance is better measured maybe on a rowing machine (which is much less technique-dependent and uses more muscles), or with a chipper-style workout like we saw at the Games (which tests endurance across many different modal domains). Stamina, and coordination are much better measured in a way that isn't so technique-dependent.

Now if we go back to olympic lifting, we might ask if there is a better way to measure power. The only thing I can think of off the top of my head is something like a vertical leap. Frankly, I think a vertical leap would be a great candidate for a CrossFit Games event. But it doesn't measure explosiveness farther out in the strength spectrum. Maybe you could do a weighted vertical leap, but that still won't get near the weights that are possible with olympic lifts. If you substitute vertical leap for olympic lifts, you also lose out on the agility, balance, and coordination aspects that olympic lifts test.

But maybe there is a way to leverage swimming as a different mode of testing endurance. Maybe in the games they could have a swimming event where the athletes have to swim for a fixed amount of time instead of swimming for a fixed distance. This would reduce the importance of technique since better technique primarily serves to increase your speed. In my opinion this is an attractive idea that has some promise. (My original objection to swimming was regarding a traditional fixed-distance format.) But alas, this too has some problems. It would degenerate to the athletes swimming as slow as possible for the entire time limit, and essentially be like prescribed rest. And even here, a non-swimmer would still get tired much more easily than a swimmer. There's no good way of ensuring that the athletes will use the same level of intensity in something like this.

So that's the difference I see between olympic lifting and swimming as it relates to the CrossFit Games. My one-sentence summary might be that olympic lifting is more fundamental to human life than swimming. But I still love swimming. It can pack a pretty good cardiorespiratory punch, especially since it adds a breath control dimension that most activities don't naturally have. I think it's a great exercise to add to your CrossFit workouts. I think it can be used effectively to improve overall fitness. But the CrossFit Games is about finding the fittest person on earth according (using a clearly-stated definition of fitness), and I don't think swimming is a useful component of that measurement.