Annual Performance Progression in Swimming Across Competition Levels and Race Distances Ruiz Navarro, Jesús Juan Born, Denis-Peter athlete development career trajectories development program Objective: As performance progression provides an essential indicator for talent selection and development, this study aimed to compare annual swimming performance progression between different competitive levels and to establish benchmarks for long-term athlete development. Methods: Annual best times of swimmers who competed up to the age of 21 years and achieved over 450 World Aquatics points were extracted from the database of European Aquatics. A total of 13,310 male and 7798 female pool swimmers of all race distances were grouped into three performance levels. Results: The results showed a continuous decline in annual performance progression throughout the years across all race distances (all p < 0.001) and in both sexes. There were differences between performance level across the age groups for all race distances in male swimmers, but only for the 100–400 m races in females (p < 0.05). Absolute performance showed significant main effects for level and age over all race distances for both sexes (all p < 0.001). Conclusions: Annual performance progression of swimmers consistently decreases across the competitive lifetime in both sexes, regardless of race distance and performance level. The eventspecific benchmarks should be used as a framework to set realistic goals for both sexes and swimmers of different competitive levels, as well as to guide swimmers throughout their careers. 2025-10-07T09:56:06Z 2025-10-07T09:56:06Z 2025-07-31 journal article Ruiz-Navarro, J.J.; Born, D.-P. Annual Performance Progression in Swimming Across Competition Levels and Race Distances. J. Funct. Morphol. Kinesiol. 2025, 10, 297. https://doi.org/10.3390/jfmk10030297 https://hdl.handle.net/10481/106864 10.3390/jfmk10030297 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ open access Atribución 4.0 Internacional MDPI