The general consensus is that Australians are fairly adept swimmers. Before we can safely say why Australians are good at swimming, let's see if they really are, how other countries compare, and what the relationship between swimming and Australia is really like.
Is Australia Known for Swimming?
Firstly, Australia being known for swimming is definitely a stereotype. Naturally, swimming is a popular pastime in Australia given that the country is one of the world's biggest islands and is famously known as an island continent.
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That gives Australia close to 34,000 kilometres of coastline (there's a whole issue with accurately measuring coastline that we won't get into here) and plenty of places to swim. Australia is also home to plenty of lakes. In fact, the country is tenth in the world in terms of lakes.
While not every lake is swimmable and neither is every part of the ocean, this does promote the idea that Australians would like to swim.
Combining all these places to swim with the fact that the Australian climate is generally good enough to swim, you can see why lots of people think that Australians spend a lot of time swimming.
It should be noted, however, that with any kind of generalisation, it won't be true for everyone. There will also be plenty of Australians who don't know how to swim or just aren't that interested in it. There are lots of things to do in the country and everybody's different and has their own hobbies and interests.
Can Everyone in Australia Swim?
Not everybody in Australia can swim. Recent reports have even suggested that around 5% of Australians are unable to swim. However, this number could be higher as these kinds of studies can be skewed by participants being unwilling to admit that they can't swim.
Fortunately, it's never too late to learn how to swim, but the number is somewhat concerning because of how much time Australians spend near lakes, pools, and the ocean.
This 5% is actually a very low figure, especially once you begin to look at how many people around the world can swim. It's estimated that around 55% of the world's population cannot swim. However, the numbers of people unable to swim are much higher in low-income economies than they are in high-income economies like Australia.
For high-income economies like Australia's, around three-quarters of the population can swim, making Australia's reported 95% still higher than the average. In this report, Australia and New Zealand were reported together with 90% of men being able to swim and 85% of women being able to swim.
This number is higher than any other region in the report, but the global trend that women are less likely to be competent swimmers than men still remains, though the difference is much less in Australia. In fact, most of Australia's most successful Olympians are women.
Globally, 57% of men can swim but just 32% of women, something which just isn't true in Australia, though this swimming gender gap is still present.
Not everyone in Australia can swim, but the number of proficient swimmers is much higher than in other countries, not forgetting that the risk is the same for any percentage of the population who can't swim unassisted.
Why Does Australia Have so Many Swimmers?
The reason for Australia's high level of swimming proficiency is very likely due to some of the reasons we mentioned earlier. Australia is a big country with a lot of places to swim like the ocean, lakes, and local swimming pools.
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We should also mention the fact that Australia builds more domestic swimming pools per capita than any other country in the world. Of course, the latter could be the cause or the effect: Australians have more pools because they like to swim or more Australians learn to swim because private swimming pools are so abundant. It could also be a bit of both. This doesn't mean that everyone in Australia has their own pool, but it does mean that you're more likely to meet an Australian with their own pool.
As Australia is also a high-income economy as we mentioned before, there's more money around for public pools, swimming initiatives, etc. so the country is naturally more likely to have more people who can swim.
Is Australia the Best at Swimming?
As a country, Australia is definitely the most proficient at swimming in the sense that it has the highest number of people who can swim unassisted.
However, it really depends on what you mean by “the best” and what you want to measure. As a population, Australia is home to a lot of the world's best swimmers, too.
At the very highest level, the Olympic Games, Australia performs exceptionally well in swimming. Across all sports in the Summer Olympic Games, over 40% of Australia's gold medals come from swimming. The percentages are fairly similar too when it comes to their silver and gold medals, too.
When it comes to overall rankings at the Olympic Games, Australia sits proudly in 10th place, which is a very respectable position for the country's size and population. However, if you consider only swimming at the Olympics, Australia sits in second place and is only bested by the US, a country with easily ten times the population and arguably a much greater interest in the Olympics than any other country in the world.
With 257 gold medals, no country is going to catch the US any time soon, but Australia's 69 gold medals are well ahead of Hungary's 28. East Germany is technically in third place with 38 gold medals, but we don't see them winning anything any time soon.
Even if you consider East Germany, West Germany, and a unified Germany's combined medal tally, that's still only 54 gold medals and enough for third place.
At the Olympics, Australia isn't technically the best at swimming as the overall medal table puts the US firmly in that position, but that's not the only way we could judge this.
Which Country is the Best at Swimming?
Naturally, the outright winner in terms of Olympic swimmers is the United States with more medals, more Olympians, and many other ways to measure how well they perform at the very top level of competitive swimming.
We already mentioned it, but you could also consider that the US has over 10 times the population of Australia so if you go by medals per capita, Australia starts to look really good. However, when you do that, you end up with results that can be really skewed by relatively small countries that win a medal or two.
For example, the principality of San Marino has more medals per capita than any nation at the Olympics having won 3 medals for a population of about 30,000 people. These medals weren't in swimming, but if we want to go by medals per capita to prove Australia is the best, we'll likely end up with a tiny nation skewing our results and taking the top spot.
For one, Hungary's 29 gold medals aren't anywhere near Australia's 69 gold medals, but Hungary's population of around 9.6 million people makes it just over 2.5 times smaller than Australia's. Put simply, they have more Olympic swimming gold medals per person.
In short, it's really impossible to say and there are so many different ways to try and work it out that nobody would ever really be happy with the results. What we can say is that Australia is both pretty good at swimming overall and in terms of medals per capita.
So is Australia the best at swimming?
Combine the high levels of swimming proficiency and the top-level sporting prowess and you can certainly put together a pretty convincing case to say that it is.
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What Sport is Australia Best At?
So it's pretty safe to say that Australia is good at swimming (find out more about some of their best male swimmers). A lot of the population can swim proficiently and the top-level athletes are among the best in the world, but Australian sport is more than just that.
Australia excels in a lot of other sports. Cricket is hugely popular and Australia regularly performs well in that and is ranked first in the world at the time of writing.
Rugby is another popular sport in which Australia regularly does well. The Wallabies, as the team is known, has never been outside of the top 10 in terms of the World Rugby Ranking.
Australia is also famous for producing some high-ranking tennis players including Nick Kyrgios, one of just three tennis players to have ever beaten tennis' Big Three (Djokovic, Federer, and Nadal) the first time he played against them.
Of course, there are also sports native to Australia that Australia is naturally very good at, but it's quite difficult to say that Australia is the best at Australian rules football when the sport isn't widely played outside the country.
Basically, there are lots of sports in which Australia excels, but it's definitely fair to say that swimming is one of them!
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