Swimming

SWIMMING

SWIMMING. The origins of swimming are lost in the murk of prehistory, but humans probably developed the skill after watching animals "dog paddle." Swimmers appear in artwork on Egyptian tombs, in Assyrian stone carvings, in Hittite and Minoan drawings, and in Toltec murals. Ancient gladiators swam while training, and Plato believed that a man who could not swim was uneducated. Contemporaries reported that both Julius Caesar and Charlemagne were strong swimmers.

The first swimming races of which there is a record were held in Japan in 36 b.c., but England was the first modern society to develop swimming as a competitive sport. In the nineteenth century, the British competed in the breaststroke and the sidestroke, both modifications of the "dog paddle." They were generally more interested in endurance than speed, and viewed swimming the English Channel as the supreme test.

While Europeans employed the breaststroke and side-stroke, natives of the Americas, West Africa, and some Pacific Islands used variations of the crawl. Europeans got their first glimpse of this new stroke in 1844, when a group of American Indians was invited to London to compete. Flying Gull bested Tobacco by swimming 130 feet in an unheard-of 30 seconds. One observer noted that the Indians "thrashed the water violently" and compared their arm action to the "sails of a windmill." The British were impressed with the natives' speed, but they considered their style uncivilized.

The overhand stroke was finally introduced to Britain in the 1870s by J. Arthur Trudgen, who noticed indigenous people using the technique during a trip to South America. Upon his return, he began teaching this approach to others. As British swimmers began combining the Trudgen overhand with the breaststroke frog kick, the focus of competition began to shift from distance to speed.

Trudgen had failed to notice the natives' use of the flutter kick, but this was not lost on another British swimmer, Frederick Cavill. In 1878, Cavill immigrated to Australia, where he taught swimming and built pools. During a trip to the Solomon Islands near the turn of the century, Cavill closely watched Pacific Islanders swimming. Noting the way they combined the overhand stroke with kicking action, he taught this new method to his six sons and other British émigrés. His sons, in turn, carried the "Australian crawl" back to England and the United States. The American swimmer Charles Daniels improved on the "Australian crawl" by timing his kick to his armstroke. Using the "American crawl," Daniels won the United States's first Olympic gold medal in 1904.

Although the Greeks did not include swimming in the ancient Olympics, a freestyle competition was part of the first modern games held in 1896. (Freestyle meant that any stroke was allowed.) In 1900, the backstroke was added, as well as three unusual swimming events: an obstacle course, a test of underwater swimming, and a 4,000-meter event. Only the backstroke competition was retained. By 1904, the crawl was becoming the dominant

---

freestyle stroke, so the breaststroke was made a separate event.

The first American swimmer to achieve national fame was Duke Kahanamoku, a native Hawaiian who won three gold medals and two silvers in the 1912, 1920, and 1924 Olympics. Kahanamoku used six flutter kicks for each cycle of his arms, a technique that is now considered the classic freestyle form. In 1924, the twenty-year-old Johnny Weissmuller beat Kahanamoku, achieving international celebrity. In a decade of racing, Weissmuller set twenty-four world swimming records, won five Olympic gold medals, and never lost a race of between 50 yards and a half-mile. Weissmuller achieved even greater fame, however, when he went on to Hollywood to play Tarzan on the silver screen.

Women were excluded from Olympic swimming until 1912 because they were considered too frail to engage in competitive sports. In the 1910s, however, the newly formed Women's Swimming Association of New York gave women an opportunity to train for competition. Gertrude Ederle, the daughter of a delicatessen owner, began setting world records in distances of between 100 and 800 meters. Wanting to win fame for her swimming club, in 1926 she became the first woman to swim the English Channel. The nineteen-year-old's time of 14 hours and 31 minutes broke the existing men's record, and Ederle returned home to a ticker-tape parade. The first American woman to win an Olympic swimming title was Ethelda Bleibtrey, who captured three gold medals in 1920.

The early twentieth century also saw a boom in leisure swimming. Americans had been going to the beach for seaside recreation ever since railroads made public beaches more accessible in the late nineteenth century. The first municipal pool in the United States was built in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1887, and by the 1920s many cities and some wealthy homeowners had installed pools. Leisure swimming had health as well as social benefits; President Franklin D. Roosevelt swam regularly to strengthen legs weakened by paralysis, while President John F. Kennedy swam to strengthen his back muscles.

Beginning in the 1930s, women's swimsuits became increasingly streamlined and revealing. (Fabric rationing during World War II [1939–1945] led to the introduction of the two-piece bathing suit, and the "bikini"—named for a U.S. nuclear testing site in the South Pacific—debuted in 1946.) Pin-up girls and starlets appeared in bathing attire, and in 1944 swimming champion Esther Williams made a splash in the film Bathing Beauty. Williams's appearance in a string of Hollywood swimming movies in the 1940s and 1950s helped popularize synchronized swimming.

Hollywood was not alone in turning a camera on swimmers. In 1934, Iowa University coach Dave Armbruster first filmed swimmers in order to study their strokes. To speed his breaststrokers, Armbruster developed a double overarm recovery known as the "butterfly." An Iowa swimmer, Jack Seig, paired this with a "dolphin kick," in which his body undulated from the hips to the toes. The butterfly was so exhausting that it was initially considered a novelty, but swimmers using the overhand stroke began dominating breaststroke races. In 1953, the butterfly was finally recognized as a separate competitive stroke.

The final years of the twentieth century were golden for American swimmers. Mark Spitz, a butterfly and free-style racer, garnered seven gold medals and seven world records in the 1972 Munich Olympics, the most ever in a single Olympiad. In 1992, freestyler Matt Biondi matched Spitz's career record of 11 Olympic medals (The only other Olympian to win 11 medals was shooter Carl Osburn). In the 1980s, Tracy Caulkins became the only American swimmer ever to hold U.S. records in every stroke; she won three gold medals at the Olympics in 1984. Competing in the 1992, 1996, and 2000 Games, Jenny Thompson won ten butterfly and freestyle medals, including eight golds, the most ever captured by a woman.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gonsalves, Kamm, Herbert, ed. The Junior Illustrated Encyclopedia of Sports. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970.

USA Swimming Official Web site. Home page at http://www.usa-swimming.org.

Yee, Min S., ed. The Sports Book: An Unabashed Assemblage of Heroes, Strategies, Records, and Events. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1975.

Wendy Wall