When it works we call it intuition. When it doesn't we call it superstition. There are all sorts of availability biases at work here; none of which really support the use of intuition as a valuable, predictive resource. After all, if your intuition fails to predict something, there must be some lurking variable somewhere that you failed to account for. Not that the intuition is wrong /s.
The thing is, depth discussions have been going on for decades and these swimmers literally live in the pool. When people spend literally 40+ hours a week in water I trust them well before I trust scientists because it takes scientists so much longer to catch up and measure what the practitioners are observing.
Like this reminds me of Beckham/Ronaldo doing free kicks. They had a deep understanding of controlling the ball well beyond what scientists knew how to measure and explain what they're doing.
