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inscribed in the military training manuals of the Romans, the Japanese samurai and the knights of medieval Europe.. In classical Greece, where races were held in honour of the god Dionysius, swimming was considered to be on a par with literacy – indeed, the fundamentals of education were ‘the alphabet and swimming’..

In its modern super-conditioned and competitive forms, swimming is a rather different beast, demanding of its athletes immense cardiovascular reserves and muscular power combined with supple grace and perfect technique..A top-class swimmer has to master the art of extreme but relaxed effort – if you start fighting the water, speed and power are lost..As the great American coach William Bachrach once remarked‘You can’t do anything violently or suddenly in water, it even takes time for a stone to sink..’

The Story of Swimming

With the self-assurance characteristic of the age, a

Victorian treatise on swimming could open:‘There is no instance of any foreigner, civilised or uncivilised, whose achievements in the water surpass those of the British..’The modern craze for swimming had begun in Georgian England, when the aristocracy discovered the benefits and pleasures of sea bathing.. Once public swimming had become acceptable, it wasn’t long before races were being held on the Thames, off the Kent coast and across Portsmouth harbour..A small circuit of professional swimmers, known as ‘the professors’, found an audience for feats of endurance, exhibitions of diving stunts, fancy swimming, and races in lakes, rivers and ponds..

In 1828 the world’s first municipal swimming pool was opened in Liverpool..Although private pools had been in existence in Britain for the previous fifty years, the municipal version was to provide the infrastructural backbone of the sport, a spine greatly stiffened by the passage of the 1846 Baths and Washhouses Act. . This law was passed in an effort to raise the level of urban hygiene by encouraging local authorities to build laundries and bathhouses for the poor.. Large plunge pools – the most economical way of

cleansing the masses – provided space for swimming as well as washing..Those of a more refined sensibility could use the first class pools, in which the water was changed more regularly..

A British Swimming Society, formed in 1837, organised races in the Serpentine and embarked on a programme of instruction.. Its successors attempted to organise the sport on a more orderly basis and the rule book established by the British Amateur Swimming Association (founded 1869) set out the principles on which international and Olympic swimming are nowadays based..

While competitive swimming took off in Europe’s elite ath- letic clubs and schools from the mid-nineteenth century, the popular expansion of the sport came in the 1880s.. Pools became widespread and water quality improved. . In 1875 one Captain Webb became the first man to swim the English Channel, becoming a global celebrity and lending swimming an air of heroic manliness..Thirty years later, the Australian film star Annette Kel- lerman’s (unsuccessful) attempts to do the same helped bring women into the swimming mainstream and ensure that swimming was the first regular women’s sport at the Olympic Games..

Game On: Swimming Basics

For freestyle there are five races – 50m, 100m, 200m,

400m and 1500m (800m for women)..All the other strokes are raced over 100m and 200m.. In 2008 the first 10km marathon was contested.. Swum in open water, the 2012 competition will be held in the Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park..

Breaststroke

Breaststroke is a two-part stroke: a frog-like kick of

the legs is followed by an arm movement sweeping the water behind the swimmer. .The oldest of the four racing strokes, it was often depicted and described in ancient art and literature, and was practised with the swimmer’s head out of the water.. Over the years swimmers have increased their speed by keeping the head sub- merged as much as possible..

BRITAIN’S LUCY MORTON WINNING GOLD IN THE Women’S 200M BREASTSTROKE, PARIS 1924

At the 1956 Olympics Japanese gold medallist Masaru Furu- kawa swam entire lengths without surfacing..While this raised speeds it also led to oxygen deprivation and health concerns.. Under modern rules, the head must break the surface on every full stroke, although the swimmer is allowed just one stroke underwater after turning..

100m Breaststroke | Men: 58.91, Kosuke Kitajima ( Japan) Beijing 2008. Women: 1:05.17, Leisel Jones (Australia) Beijing 2008. 200m Breaststroke | Men: 2:07.64, Kosuke Kitajima ( Japan)

Beijing 2008. Women: 2:20.22, Rebecca Soni (USA) Beijing 2008.

Butterfly

In the 1930s American breaststroke swimmers at the

University of Iowa began to experiment with a new action in which the arms were brought through the air together, over the head and into the water, rather than being pushed through the water..This was combined with a newly invented dolphin or fin-tail kick.. First seen at the 1936 Olympics, the butterfly stroke proved faster than traditional breaststroke within two years, and in 1952 it was codified as a separate event..

100m Butterfly | Men: 50.58 Michael Phelps (USA) Beijing 2008.

Women: 56.61 Inge De Brujin (Netherlands) Sydney 2000.

200m Butterfly | Men: 1:52.03, Michael Phelps (USA) Beijing 2008.

Women: 2:04.18, Liu Zige (China) Beijing 2008.

Backstroke

Backstroke began life as a very genteel affair with both

hands brought up and over the head simultaneously and then pulled through the water to propel the swimmer.. But at the 1912 Olympics American backstroker Harry Hebb powered the competition aside with the straight-armed, alternate arm stroke that is still used today..

In the 1930s Australian swimmers worked out that a bent arm under water was better than a straight arm.At the 1988 Seoul Games the Japanese swimmer Diachi Suzuki and the American David ‘Blast-Off’ Berkoff blew their competition away by swimming up to 30m under water using a butterfly kick..The technique was promptly banned..Today, underwater backstroke swimming is restricted to 15m after turning..

100m Backstroke | Men: 52.54, Aaron Peirsol (USA) Beijing 2008.

Women: 58.77 , Kirsty Coventry (Zimbabwe) Beijing 2008.

200m Backstroke | Men: 1:53.94, Ryan Lochte (USA) Beijing 2008.

Women: 2:05.24, Kirsty Coventry (Zimbabwe) Beijing 2008.

Freestyle (crawl)

Any kind of stroke is allowed in freestyle races –

you could use sidestroke or doggy paddle if you chose – but as front crawl is the fastest stroke that’s what everyone uses. .As with backstroke, 15m of underwater swimming is allowed per length in Olympic freestyle racing..

Widely practised in the Pacific and South America, it was first seen in Britain in 1848 when an ex-army officer and impresario called Rankin brought a troupe of Ojibwa Indians to London.. In Holborn Baths two of their number – The Flying Gull and To- bacco – took on one of the London swimming ‘Professors’, a Mr Harold Kenworthy..After giving a long display in the water, in which TheTimes saw them ‘lash the water violently with their arms like the

sails of a windmill’,theAmericans were soundly beaten by the fresher Kenworthy, doing the breaststroke.. Disconcerted by the inelegance of the crawl, the British persisted with breaststroke, and it fell to the Americans to modernise the technique.. Charles Daniels,American gold medallist at the 1904 Games, was an early exemplar, and at the 1912 Olympics the Hawaiian swimmer Duke Kahanmoku introduced the world to the six-kicks-a-cycle technique, in which the kick starts from the hips, producing more power..

50m Freestyle | Men: 21.30, Cesar Cielo Filho (Brazil) Beijing 2008.

Women: 24.06, Britta Steffen (Germany) Beijing 2008.

100m Freestyle | Men: 47.05, Eamon Sullivan (Australia) Beijing 2008. Women: 53.12, Britta Steffen (Germany) Beijing 2008.

200m Freestyle | Men: 1:42.96, Michael Phelps (USA) Beijing 2008.

Women: 1:54.82 , Federica Pellegrini (Italy) Beijing 2008. 400m Freestyle | Men: 3:40.59, Ian Thorpe (Australia)

Sydney 2000. Women: 4:02.19, Federica Pellegrini (Italy) Beijing 2008. 800m Freestyle | Women: 8:14.10, Rebecca Addlington

(Great Britain) Beijing 2008.

1500m Freestyle | Men: 14:38.92, Grant Hackett

(Australia) Beijing 2008.

MARK SPITZ OVERCOMing ‘TACHe DRAG’ IN The 200M BUtterfly At MUNICH 72

Medleys & Relays

There are two individual medley events, the 200m and

400m, in which each swimmer must swim four sequences of 50m or 100m in the following order: butterfly, breaststroke, back-

stroke, freestyle..

Finally,there are the team relay races in which swimmers take it in turns to compete..These races are the 4 x 100m freestyle, the 4 x 200m freestyle and the 4 x 100m medley, in which each of the four members of the team swims a different stroke in the same order as the individual medley..

200m Individual Medley | Men: 1:54.23, Michael Phelps (USA)

Beijing 2008. Women: 2:08.45, Stephanie Rice (Australia) Beijing 2008.

400m Individual Medley | Men: 4:03.84, Michael Phelps (USA)

Beijing 2008. Women: 4:29.45, Stephanie Rice (Australia) Beijing 2008.

4 x 100m Freestyle Relay | Men: 3:08.24, USA, Beijing 2008. Women: 3:08.24, Netherlands, Beijing 2008.

4 x 200m Freestyle Relay | Men: 6:58.56, USA,

Beijing 2008. Women: 7:44.31, Australia, Beijing 2008.

4 x 100m Medley Relay Men: 3:29.34, USA, Beijing 2008.

Women: 3:52.69, Australia, Beijing 2008.

The Finer Points

Suited and Booted

In recent years, Olympic and world swimming records

have fallen like nine pins..Twenty-five world record times were set at Beijing 2008 and another forty-three at the 2009 World Championships..

While technique, nutrition and training have undoubtedly played a part in this, the consensus was that new body suits and pool technologies had introduced a step change into the sport.. The all-body polyurethane suits – which can change a swimmer’s body shape and seriously reduce drag – proved so controversial that FINA (the sport’s governing body) banned them in 2010.. Comparing performances in Beijing with London 2012 will be an interesting exercise, and a guide to just how significant this shortlived swimsuit technology has been..

A History of Swimming Kit

Pre-nineteenth century Medieval knights and samurai warriors had to learn to paddle in their armour, but the birthday suit was the kit of choice for most swimmers.

Early twentieth century Knitted woollen one-piece suits were the

norm.They preserved modesty but were incredibly heavy and hard to swim in.

1924 Silk suits make their debut at the Paris Olympics.

1956 Men’s nylon swim briefs arrive at Melbourne.The Australian men are the first known Olympic competitors to shave their bodies.This has a minor impact on drag, but a psychological validity.

Swimming Goes to the Olympics

They wanted a pool but money was tight, so the organis-

ers of the first modern Olympics held four races in the frigid waters of the Bay of Zea, south of Athens.. 20,000 spectators saw Hungarian Alfred Hajos, whose father had drowned in the Danube when he was a child, win two gold medals.. It sounded tough out there.. Hajos remembered,‘The icy water almost cut into our stomachs .... .

My will to live completely overcame my desire to win.. I cut through the water with a powerful determination and only became calm when the boats came back in my direction and began to fish out the numbed competitors who were giving up the struggle..’

The murky waters of the River Seine provided the setting for two brilliant but one-off races at Paris 1900.. In the underwater race contestants swam submerged for up to 60m, and were awarded two points for each metre swum, and one point for each second that they stayed under water. . Frenchman Charles deVandev- ille took the gold.. Curiously the Danish bronze medallist Peter Lykkeberg actually swam for nearly thirty seconds longer than DeVandeville, but did not travel as far, as he went in a circle.. Meantime, in the aquatic obstacle race, competitors had to climb a pole, scramble over a row of boats and then swim (against the river’s currents) under a second row of boats. .The winner, Frederick Lane of Australia, received a 50-pound bronze horse instead of a gold medal.. In the more conventional events, the star of the Games was John Jarvis, described as ‘fat all over .. .. .. his breasts fall like a woman’s, but he has powerful shoulders and tremendous thighs’..

In the bacteria-infested boating lake of the St Louis Games of 1904, the 50-yard freestyle race came down to a contest between the American J. Scott Leary and the Hungarian Zoltan Hamay.. Hamay appeared to lead from start to finish, but American judges stationed some distance from the finishing line claimed he’d stopped swimming short of the line.. Leary then got out of the water and complained that the Hungarian had obstructed him..The debate soon degenerated into a brawl involving both athletes and officials, and was only resolved by all parties agreeing to a swim-off.. After two nervy false starts, Hamay got his gold..

The 1908 London Games saw the first tailor-made Olympic pool, which was 100 yards long and placed inside the athletics track in the White City Stadium.. It was the first and last Games at which Britain topped the swimming medals table..At Stockholm in 1912 Sarah ‘Fanny’ Durac won a gold for Australia, while the British women won the relay..The Austrian team, which won the relay bronze, was entirely Jewish.. In Vienna, and all over Central Europe, swimming had become a defining feature of a modern, muscular mitteleuropa Judaism, countering the stereotypes of the unathletic Jew who was too timid to get in the water..

In the inter-war years, American swimming began its rise to global domination, driven by a combination of well-funded university programmes and a craze for all forms of aquatic sports and entertainments in the beach metropolis of Southern California..The swimming star of the 1920 Antwerp Games was the Hawaiian Duke Kahanmoku, best known for his pioneering role in the development and popularisation of surfing..At Antwerp he added to the gold and silver he had won in Stockholm in 1912 with two golds, powered by his innovative freestyle flutter kick.. He took silver at the 1924 Paris Games before launching into parallel careers as surfer, Hollywood actor and sheriff of Honolulu.. He lost out in Paris to Johnny Weissmuller who won three titles that year and a further two in Amsterdam 1928, before himself heading off to Hollywood..

The next swimming powerhouse was Japan..The Japanese had first competed in Olympic swimming in 1920,disastrously;schooled in the nineteenth-century tradition of samurai swimming, they were utterly uncompetitive..There was a furious reaction at home, and the modernisers soon prevailed, with pioneering photographic stroke-analysis combined with the iron discipline of the warrior life at the Lake Hamman training complex..

By 1932 the Japanese were ready: they won five out of the six men’s events and all three medals in the 100m backstroke..Their coach argued there was something more than technique at work, arguing ‘our swimmers are imbued with the national spirit .. .. .. and what superiority we have can be attributed to this’..At Berlin the men won another three medals and Hideko Maehata,in the 200m breaststroke, became the first Japanese woman to win a swimming