In our countdown and analysis of the past decade, today we consider the fate of nations in the race pool - the top 10 in the league of Olympic excellence and which of the leading nations stepped up and which slipped back

The Top 10 Olympic swim Nations, and how they moved up and down the chart

The Olympic league is fairly straightforward: at least one Olympic gold medal must have been won for inclusion in the count;  points are allocated for medals - 10 for gold, 5 for silver and 2 for bronze;  two points are allocated for each top four finish and one point for any placing 5th to 8th across all Olympic finals, 2000, 2004 and 2008. Australia, the Netherlands and Japan punch well above their weight in terms of the population they have to draw on, though such considerations are stacked with complexities: easier, it might be said, to recruit Down Under given the attention paid to and importance given to swimming, especially in a decade that got underway with Sydney 2000 and featured the likes of all-time greats Ian Thorpe and Grant Hackett. That said, you still have to do the job, regardless of what walks through the door. And, as any US coach will tell you, maintaining a leading role in the sport - as the US, and to a lesser extent Australia, have done for so many years - is an achievement in its own right, one that reflects toughness, resolve and dedication to constant learning on behalf of that community of people who remain as generations of swimmers come and go.

Three of the top four nations have weighty sports science programmes behind them and are stepped in a long tradition of hacking back border lines, boundaries and limits, while the Netherlands relied on a handful of people for its success in the pecking order of nations, namely a post-1999 Inge de Bruijn and coach Jacco Verhaeren and his charges, at the helm of them all Pieter Van Den Hoogenband. Five European nations follow the big four in a relatively close pack, with Italy 's beyond-expectation 2000 Sydney 2000 results weighing heavily for its 5th place in our Olympic swim league. China,  nation that has produced some of the most erratic results in swimming history over the past 15 years, claims the last slot in the following Top 10 nations 2000-09.

The Top 10 Nations 

The first percentage is the proportion of Olympic spoils won, all medals and finals (the comparison in brackets is the same calculation for the 1990s)

• USA: 814  - 38.2% (35.6%)
• AUS: 464 -  21.7% (11.4%)
• NED: 161 - 7.5% (1.6%)
• JPN: 160 - 7.5% (3.1%)
• ITA: 115 - 5.4% (1.9%)
• FRA: 104 - 4.9% (1.8%)
• GER: 95 - 4.4% (10.9%)
• GBR: 84 - 3.9% (1.8%)
• RUS: 71 - 3.3% (12.2%)
• CHN: 65 - 3% (9.5%)

(Just outside the top 10 for 2000-09 - Romania, Hungary, Sweden, Ukraine, South Africa and Canada).

And here is how the league looks in terms of progress of nations in relation to one another on the conveyor belt of betterment that never stops (even though some things may cause a longer delay that others when it comes to consideration of the clock that links one generation to the next and contributes much to the thread of history and the lore of sport):

The Olympic progress chart 

(relative gain - or loss - over percentage of spoils decade to decade)

The right side of the line, with a gain (the divide between No2 to No5 is negligible)

• 1. NED (weighted in the first half of the decade and largely dependent on two outstanding individuals)
• 2. ITA (weighted in the first half of  the decade)
• 3. FRA (weighted in the second half of the decade, trend improving)
• 4. JPN (consistent throughout, leaning towards a second-half weighting)
• 5. GBR (weighted in the second half of the decade, trend improving)
• 6. AUS (consistent throughout, as a team, with a gender ebb and flow that reflects the fact that the Gold and Green shoal has yet to find a moment when its men and women reach a peak at the same moment)
• 7. USA (consistent throughout, as a team, leaning strongly on her men for strength towards the end of the decade as US women found themselves in a pincer movement of Aussie and European strength, with Asia challenging, towards the end of the decade)

and...

The wrong side of the line, with a big loss

• 8. GER (The number of swimmers placed in Olympic finalists at three Games 2000-08 was only just over half the numbers Germany placed in finals at two games, 1992-96)
• 9. CHN (the doping scandals of the 1990s explain much of a drop from a level once described officially as "what you'd expect from a population of a billion" before FINA was drawn to action under pressure from coaches, swimmers and media)
• 10. RUS (this is partly explained by the break-up of the former Soviet Union, the tally for the 1992 Games reflecting a Unified Team of what would become several autonomous states)

Hungary, with a 10% share of Olympic spoils in the 1990s, courtesy of Krisztina Egerszegi and Tamas Darnyi in the main, with Norbert Rozsa contributing, was the fourth nation to incur a big drop, falling to a figure of just over 2% in the first decade of the new Millennium.

The Top 100 Memories:

Part I: 91 - 100, the year 2000.

Part II: 81 - 90, the year 2001.

Part III: 71 - 80, the year 2002.

Part IV: 61 - 70, the year 2003.

Part V: 51 - 60, the year 2004.

Part VI: 41 - 50, the year 2005.

Part VII: 31 - 40, the year 2006.

Part VIII: 21 - 30, the year 2007.

Part IX: 11 - 19, the years 2008-09.

Part X: No 10 - the best 20 swimmers of the decade