July 24, 2014 3:23 p.m. ET  Following the 2013 swimming world championships in Barcelona, an eye-opening email made its way to Indiana University's aquatic science center. A Swedish swimmer wrote that the pool at the championships had seemed to harbor a current that propelled athletes in certain lanes.  Now, newly published research shows that something strange happened at those world championships.  In 50-meter sprints—in which competitors swim only one direction—an unusual number of medal winners emerged from one side of the pool. The lane 8 side of the pool produced a bonanza of medals, the lane 1 side a preponderance of losers, concludes a paper published this month in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. The paper was written and researched by Joel Stager and Chris Brammer of IU's Counsilman Center for the Science of Swimming, and Andrew Cornett of Eastern Michigan University.  The authors concluded that "the existence of a current is the only cause that we can propose to explain these findings."  Viktoria Dijakovic, a spokeswoman for FINA, the sport's international governing body, said that no swimmer had lodged a protest of the races' results and that the 2013 world championships were the first time that the topic of a current had surfaced. She noted that even the study's authors wrote that they could not confirm the presence of a current.  But Trevor Tiffany, spokesperson for A&T Europe S.p.a.'s Myrtha Pools division, which built the 2013 championships pool, acknowledged after seeing Stager's study that "the times would say there was" a current in the pool.  Tiffany said the type of water nozzles used in the 2013 championships pool had been used in previous competitions, and that the results in Barcelona were a mystery.  "This is just an anomaly we were not prepared for," said Tiffany, chairman of Myrtha USA.  In Barcelona, rumors of a current surfaced in the early days of the meet and surprised FINA because, Dijakovic said, "by definition, pools don't have a current." But the rumors persisted, covered by French and Australian newspapers.  To investigate the rumors, Myrtha and FINA devised a makeshift test, using a floating plastic bottle that showed no discernible current.  After finishing 31st in lane 1 of the 50-meter backstroke, Swedish swimmer Magdalena Kuras was disappointed, surprised and puzzled. So after the meet, she emailed Swimming World magazine seeking an investigation of the rumored currents, and her email was forwarded to IU's Stager. Swimming World published some of Stager's data last August and called it a "stunning development."  The paper's authors analyzed finishing times for the semifinalists and finalists in the meet's eight 50-meter races—four different strokes for men, four for women.  The researchers found that swimmers who swam in the "slower" half of the pool (lanes 1-4) for the semifinal then switched to the "faster" half (5-8) for the final improved their finishing times by 1%–significantly greater improvement than other groups.  In championship events, the fastest qualifying swimmer is placed in lane 4, the second-fastest goes to the left of him in lane 5. Beyond that, placements are alternated to the right and left according to qualifying times. Because of that protocol, there are usually slightly more medal-winners on the lower-numbered side of the pool than on the side with higher-numbered lanes.  In the 50-meter races in the previous four world championships, for instance, swimmers in lanes 1-3 won an average of 7.25 medals, according to Stager's analysis. Swimmers in lanes 6-8 won 5.25 medals.  But at the 2013 championships, 50-meter swimmers in lanes 1-3 won one medal. Swimmers in lanes 6-8 won 11.  The authors of the paper did not suggest there was anything deliberate about the race results. They cautioned that their analysis was based only on race times, not on any study of the pool, which Tiffany said was disassembled shortly after the 2013 competition.  Myrtha has a business partnership through 2020 with USA Swimming and is scheduled to build two temporary pools for the 2016 U.S. Olympic trials in Omaha. Tiffany called the current controversy a "terrible situation" for the company.  American swimmer Eugene Godsoe said he wasn't sure whether there was a current in the pool that day, but that he and other competitors had heard about the rumored speed and slowness of certain lanes. Godsoe won a somewhat surprising silver medal in the 50-meter butterfly, swimming in lane 8 in the final. It was his fastest-ever time in that event.  "If there was a current, I think it was minuscule compared with the mental effect it had on the athletes swimming," Godsoe said. "If you're a swimmer and in the back of your head it's, 'I'm going to be really slow 'cause I'm in lane 1,' whether or not that's true, that's going to affect the way you perform."  Yet the placebo effect would hardly explain what happened during the 1,500-meter freestyle. In that event--involving 15 round trips in the pool—swimmers in lanes 5-8 swam faster in one direction than the other, suggesting that they faced an unfavorable current on return trips across the pool.  Conversely, lane 1-4 swimmers swam faster in the opposite direction, suggesting that any current in the pool was circular, giving swimmers in those lanes a boost on return lengths. In both cases, those results are unusual, because in distance events, the authors note, "the athletes typically attempt to maintain a fairly even pace throughout most of the race."  Now, Myrtha is devising an instrument to detect water currents and will test it at the European championships next month in Berlin, said Tiffany. He said the new instrument will be "far more sophisticated" than the improvised test used in Barcelona.  FINA's Dijakovic said that if the tool proves effective, FINA will use it before all championships and consider requiring the measurement of water movement before competitions. Currently, FINA only checks championship pools' dimensions, water quality, clearness and temperature.  Write to Rachel Bachman at rachel.bachman@wsj.com
A recent research paper points to a phantom current in the pool that may have skewed the results in 2013.