SWIMMING

In 2008, man swims 100m freestyle 18secs faster than in 1908. From lake, river and ocean, the sport moved to
pools of standard length. Along came heating, starting blocks, lane ropes that deaden waves and chlorine and
goggles for clarity. In 1908, five nations dominated. Today, 30 nations race for medals.

Ancient origins
Babylonian bas-reliefs and Assyrian wall drawings point to very early swimming skills among
humans. The most ancient and famous of drawings depicting men swimming are to be found
in the Kebir desert. They are estimated to be about 6,000 years old. The Nagoda bas-relief
also has paintings of swimmers that date back some 5,000 years.

Many of the ancient drawings and paintings come from what is now Italy. The oldest date
back 2,600 years, belonging to the Etruscans at Tarquinia. An ancient tomb in Greece
depicts swimming and diving scenes and dates back 2,500 years.

Written testament to early swimming falls within the past 3,000 years. The Bible, the Iliad, the Odyssey all
contain references to swimming. Thucydides noted the activity in scripts that are 2,400 years old. Murals of the
Tepantila House at Teotihuacan near Mexico City show men taking the plunge into the waters of Tlalocan, the
heavenly pool of Tlaloc, god of water.

Many of the world's ancient civilisations swam, including the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, Persians, Romans and
Greeks. Bathing was a tradition in the Byzantine Empire, with Constantinople at the helm, and among the
Romans Julius Caesar was famous for his swimming abilities, once wading successfully from a stricken ship to
the safety of shore for some 300m clutching important documents that had to be kept dry.

A small legion of other generals, leaders and royalty, including Charlemagne and Louis XI, also swam and
advocated the activity for its health, physical and psychological benefits.

Swimming was not part of the Ancient Olympic Games but Greeks were keen swimmers and held the activity in
high regard. One of the most cutting insults one Greek could level at another in ancient times was that his rival
was a man “who neither knew how to run nor swim”. Plato once declared that anyone who could not swim lacked
a proper education.

In terms of competitions, the Europeans claim to have hosted the earliest of organised competitions, in England
in the 1790s, but this pales by comparison to evidence from Japan that suggests races were held 2,000 years
ago. The tradition was rarely lost: in 1603 the Emperor Go-Yoozei decreed that all schoolchildren should not only
learn to swim but that they should participate in inter-school racing. Available records prove that regular school
competition did indeed take place as early as 1810.

By that time, native inhabitants of the Americas, West Africa and the South Sea Islands of the Pacific used a
type of crawl for generations before the stroke was used in sport, while breaststroke and sidestroke, more
commonly used in Europe, were adaptations of doggy paddle, a way of staying afloat that replicates the basic
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instinct of humans when thrown into water. Doggy paddle is depicted in drawings from early Middle Eastern
civilisations and in mosaics found in petrified Pompeii.

In Britain, the Roman tradition of bathing may have been diminished during the times of the Celts, Anglo-Saxons,
Vikings, and Normans, but all those histories have an abundance of swimming references. The clock was turned
back in the reign of Queen Anne, when in 1615 she declared that a second visit to the Bath Spa had improved
her constitution. Bath lost out to what would become Brighton in the 1780s, when the then Price of Wales
introduced dad, King George III, to the pleasures of bathing in salt water at sea. By 1820 the activity was hugely
popular among the English well-to-do and foreign visitors, with doctors exalting swimming, sea air and salt as
tonics for body and soul. It was at the same time that attention turned from bathing and leisure to sport and
racing.

THE FIRST SWIMMING SCRIBE

Literature is awash with swimming reference but the first

substantial volume that dealt with the activity as a sport was
De Arte Natandi, the Latin tome penned by Everard Digby in
1587. He claimed that swimming was an art, in the same
sense that the term could be applied to war, agriculture,
navigation and medicine. Digby wrote of the natural
predisposition of man in water being one in which the feet
sank and the face stayed afloat. People drowned because
they thrashed about and used arms and legs in a “disorderly
fashion”.

Basic life saving instructors and swimming teachers taught,

many years later, the veracity of the message: take a person
who cannot swim, ask him or her to float simply by taking a
deep breath and lying on water and, in the absence of panic,
inflated lungs will keep the body afloat. In Digby’s book, all
positions were described. Man could swim straight down,
pick up objects from the bottom of a lake or river, they could
swim on their front, their back, their side, and perform many
others things that fish could not. He advised on the best
months and most favourable prevailing winds when it came
to choosing when to take a dip, and warned of dangers.

Digby described sidestroke long before it became popular

and one of his sketches is entitled “to swim like a

dolphin”, indicating an undulating movement in the water. His work was translated into English in 1595 and the
reference to dolphin was not lost on scholastic authors who followed. In Thomas Hardy’s classic Far From the
Madding Crowd, one of the heroes is said to swim “en papillon”.

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 Emancipation

The world's first great professional sportswoman was a swimmer. Annette Marie Sarah
Kellerman, born on July 6, 1887, in Sydney, Australia, was a pioneer who not only
popularised swimming for women across the globe, but made it possible for them to take
the plunge as athletes: at a time when women were challenging their social standing in
society, Kellerman was the first woman of influence to disprove the lie that women were
incapable of strenuous physical exercise. She did so by challenging accepted norms of
dress and behaviour, suffering arrest and ultimately by winning an argument that opened
the floodgates to a brighter and safer future for women.

Kellerman was the biggest marketing tool swimming has ever known: in her wake, women were able to wear
bathing suits that no longer presented the risk of them drowning in their skirts, as did the 1,000 and more women
and girls who drowned when the ship ferrying them to Long Island sank in 1904 at a time when women were
allowed to bathe but not swim. Her revolution liberated women in the water and led to the appearance of female
competitors in Olympic waters for the first time in 1912.

Modern women of power would have been proud of the aquatics star who showed them the way: known as "the
perfect woman" long before Elle MacPherson, Kellerman could have taught Madonna lessons in self-promotion,
having brought on her own arrest in a deliberate attempt to cause sensation to get her message out to millions.
Kellerman was also a fitness guru who taught middle-aged women to keep fit through swimming and exercise
long before the world had heard of Jane Fonda. The Australian Mermaid was the first to place aquatic sports on
the silver screen, starring in more than 20 major films and being the subject of several others, most famously in
"Million-dollar Mermaid"; her character played by Esther Williams, the American who popularised synchronised
swimming around the world .

Kellerman was born in Marrickville, Sydney to Frederick William Kellerman, a violinist, and his French wife Alice,
a pianist and music teacher. When their daughter was six she had to wear steel braces to strengthen her
crippled legs. Swimming was also a remedy. By 15, Kellermann had New South Wales titles in record times. It
was when her parents moved to Melbourne that Kellerman took her swimming to a professional level: she gave
exhibitions of swimming and diving at the main Melbourne baths, performed a mermaid act at the Princes Court
entertainment centre and did two shows a day swimming with fish in a glass tank at the Exhibition Aquarium.

In 1905, she became the first woman to attempt to swim the English Channel, unsuccessfully, though she got
three-quarters of the way there at the third time of asking. She wore a one-piece black bodysuit, a garment that
revealed curves that were normally kept well undercover in those days and one that was a topic of opinion
columns, leading articles and dinner-table chatter. She set up her own brand of suit, known as the "Annette
Kellermans" suit, which was the prototype for the modern costume worn by women ever since.

By 1907 Kellerman had established herself as an international star after a winter season of her aquatic
vaudeville show - high diving, stunt swimming, underwater dancing and an exhibition of synchronised swimming
- at the London Hippodrome. Next stop, the United States. In Boston, Kellerman went for a dip in a thigh-
revealing one-piece swimsuit at Revere Beach. Arrested and charged with indecent exposure, Kellerman hit
headlines across the world. The judge sided with Kellerman when she said that her suit was necessary for
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"unrestricted movement when swimming". She famously said: "I can't swim wearing more stuff than you hang on
a clothesline." The new maillot version of her suit became a common sight at the beach, almost overnight.

In 1916, Kellermann became the first leading lady to do a nude scene, but ‘A Daughter of the Gods’, made by
Fox Film Corporation and the first million-dollar film production was lost. No copies are known to exist.
Kellermann wrote several books including ‘How To Swim’ (1918), a book of children's stories entitled ‘Fairy Tales
of the South Seas’ (1926) and ‘My Story’, an unpublished autobiography. A lifelong vegetarian, Kellermann
owned a health food store in Long Beach, California. She and her husband returned to live in Australia in 1970,
five years before her death at the age of 88 on November 5, 1975, at Southport, Queensland, in swimming
paradise on the Australian Gold Coast. Her remains were scattered along the Great Barrier Reef.

Epstein’s Vision

Charlotte Epstein, born in 1884 in New York City, a courtroom stenographer, founded the Women's Swimming
Association (WSA) in 1920, and became famous for promoting the health benefits of swimming as exercise.
Epstein coached the USA Women's Olympic Swimming Team in the 1920s, with startling success. One of her
coaching protégés was Louis de Breda Handley (p42). Known as "Eppie's swimmers”, her charges set 52 world
records. Epstein staged “suffrage swim races” and campaigned for women’s rights and changes to swimsuits to
allow women freedom of movement.

In 1923, a FINA committee was formed to consider the “International Swimming Costume”. At the Olympic
Games in Paris a year later, Epstein was consulted. What emerged was a rule that dictated that women’s suits
had to be black or dark blue, be cut no lower than 8cm below the armpit, no lower than 8cm below the neck line,
have material that descended into the leg by at least 10cm and, for the preservation of modesty, include a slip,
back and front, at least 8cms wide. Epstein served as manager of the USA women’s Olympic team in 1920,
1924, and 1928. A Jew, she boycotted the 1936 Games held in Nazi Germany.

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 Pre-FINA Foundations

Flying Gull taught freestyle to the world when he winged his way past a fellow Native
American Indian who went by the name Tobacco – in a race with Englishman Harold
Kenworthy, doing breaststroke - down one length of a 130-foot pool in London on April 2,
1844. Note the time: 30 seconds for the equivalent of 39.6 metres.

‘The Times’ archive holds a report from a nameless correspondent who may well have been
the first swimming writer, 154 years before the current swimming reporter for the paper
penned FINA’s Centenary book. “Their style of swimming is totally un-European. They lash

the water violently with their arms like the sails of a windmill and beat downward with their feet, blowing with
force and performing grotesque antics.” Flying Gull and Tobacco, of the Ojibbeway tribe and invited to England
by the National Swimming Society, had gone to their heavenly hunting grounds by the time Johnny Weissmuller
broke the minute using a not-too-dissimilar style in 1922, but their influence cannot be understated, and their
style had, according to folklore, been used by North American Indians, South Sea Native Island natives and
Hawaiians for hundreds of years and had been developed, it is assumed, out of necessity to find a way of
swimming faster. Despite the Indian demonstration, 50 years would pass before the stroke would be popularised
as frontcrawl. In the 1840s, sidestroke became more popular than breaststroke in racing. Charles Wallis watched
Aborigines swim in Lane Cove River, Australia, using a sidestroke with a single-arm over-water recovery. He
demonstrated the style on a visit to London in 1855. In the crowd was Professor Fred Beckwith, who went on to
win the English Championship using the technique in 1859 and did so again when he defeated Deerfoot of the
Senecca Indian tribe in a professional race in 1861.

The big breakthrough came in 1873, when John Trugeon, after observing South African Kaffirs (others suggest
he had watched South American Indians), copied their double-arm over-water action with breaststroke kick in a
160-yard race at Lambeth Baths on August 11, 1873. It was an exhausting style; one that became widely used
for shorter distances, while sidestroke remained the most commonly used technique for the rest of the 19th
Century.

In 1874, the Society, after a few names changes, became the Swimming Association of Great Britain. It was a
year later when Captain Matthew Webb caught the public’s imagination using breaststroke to become the first
person to swim across the English Channel. In 1884, the Otter Swimming Club of London, the oldest in the
world, broke away and formed the Amateur Swimming Union. The battle between the factions was finally settled,
courtesy of the diplomatic skills of Horace Davenport, with the formation of the Amateur Swimming Association,
as the ruling body for England is still known today, in 1886.

There was scant standardisation and rules rested somewhere between primitive and non-existent. Times were
irrelevant. Not so in Australia, where in 1846 at Robinson Baths in Sydney, William Redman won the 440 yards
freestyle “national championship” in 8:43. On February 9, 1858, Jo Bennett, of Sydney, beat Charles Stedman,
of England, in what was dubbed a World Championship 100-yard race at St Kilda, in Melbourne. The first regular

Championship in Australia date back to 1889.

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Over the next 50 years until FINA’s foundation, swimming’s popularity gathered pace across the world.
Federations were formed in Germany in 1882, France in 1890 and Hungary in 1896, in time for Alfred Hajos to
become the first Olympic swimming champion racing between ropes in the Bay of Zea, near Piraeus off Athens
in 1896. In New Zealand, the federation dates back to 1890 and in the United States the first national
championship, over 1 mile, was held in 1877. Scotland lays claim to a particular fame: it held the first woman’s
championship, in 1892, with Ellen Dobbie taking the 200 yards crown at Glasgow in 4:25, on breaststroke.

By the dawn of the 20th Century, modern freestyle was in the making. Englishman Fred Cavill emigrated to
Australia in 1878, watched natives in the South Seas using a style not unlike that of Flying Gull and taught his
sons. Richard Cavill won the English 100yd freestyle in 58.6sec using double-arm over-water action with legs
trailing. After the race, he was asked to describe what he was doing. He said it was like “crawling” through the
water. The term frontcrawl was born.

Richard’s brother Syd wound up in San Francisco and taught the stroke to J. Scott Leary, the first American to
swim the 100 yards in a minute, back in 1904. The style taught by the Cavills was taken up by Frederick Lane
(AUS), who at 18 raced the New South Wales mile championship taking alternate arm strokes above the water
and timing his pull to coincide with a scissor kick.

At the 1900 Olympic Games in Paris, Lane triumphed over 200m freestyle when swimming with the tide in the
River Seine. He shattered previous time standards with a 2:25.2 victory that left him six seconds ahead of
Hungarian Zoltan Halmay, whose battle with Charles Daniels (USA) marked the next phase in the development
of freestyle just as FINA was about to be born.

Structure

Swimming has come a long way in 100 years of official FINA history. When the founding fathers of the federation
gathered in London, 1908, there was no global standardisation of rules, structures, distances and general
conditions under which race competitions could be held and records set. Swimming distances were often
“guesstimates”, while most events took place in open water in which no two venues offered the same conditions,

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some racing taking place against the tide, others with the tide, some in choppy sea, others in millpond
conditions.

For the first 65 years of FINA history, the Olympic Games was the only global competition open to swimmers. If
London 1908 was the last male-only Games, then it would be 88 years before women had the same number of
events to race in as men in Olympic waters. From 1908 to 1956, the men’s programme – 100m, 400m 1,500m
freestyle, 100m backstroke, 200m breaststroke and 4x200m freestyle – remained unaltered. Women raced only
100m, 400m and 4x100m freestyle until 1924, when the 100m backstroke and 200m breaststroke were added to
their schedule.

The biggest change in the Olympic swimming programme unfolded in 1956 after the 1952 decision to split
breaststroke and butterfly into autonomous strokes. Between 1956 and 1964, men raced the 200m and women
the 100m butterfly, while the new stroke allowed a 4x100m medley relay to be introduced in 1960 and 400m
medley for men and women in 1964. That year, in Tokyo, also witnessed further growth in the men’s
programme, with 200m backstroke and 4x100m freestyle making their debut.

But it was in 1968 at Mexico City that the revolution took hold: men now had four new events – 200m freestyle,
100m breaststroke, 100m butterfly and 200m medley – while women closed the gulf to their male counterparts
with no fewer than six new events to aim at, namely 200m and 800m freestyle (allowing Debbie Meyer, p126, to
become the first woman to win three solo gold medals in Olympic waters), 200m backstroke, 100m breaststroke,
200m butterfly and 200m medley. As pressure grew to cut back the ever-growing number of participants at the
Games, FINA was asked by the International Olympic Committee to make sacrifices. Reluctantly, it elected to
remove the 200m medley for men and women and the men’s 4x100m freestyle. All three events returned for
good in 1984.

The following Games, at Seoul in 1988, gave rise to the penultimate addition to the Olympic race roster, with
50m freestyle sprints for both sexes, and in 1996 women finally had the same number of races to aim at as men,
when the 4x200m freestyle made its debut. The only difference in the male and female programmes today is that

Men race the 1,500m freestyle and women the 800m.

That distinction was got rid of at FINA World Championships in 2001, when an 800m for men and 1,500m for
women joined the party alongside 50m sprint races in all strokes. The World Championships programme
mirrored the Olympic programme (barring temporary Olympic removals) until 1986, when the 4x200m freestyle
for women and 50m freestyle sprints for both sexes made their debut. The programme at the World Youth
Championships that began in 2006 mirrors the senior event.

As the number of Olympic and World Championship events grew, so too did the number of days over which
races took place. Early Olympics featured scattered events over the course of two weeks and more but the
standard for much of the first 60 years of FINA history was a five to six-day programme. That stretched to seven
by the 1980s and in 2000, at the Olympics in Sydney, races spanned eight consecutive days. That was also the
case for World Championships from 2001 onwards, while at the 2008 Olympic Games, the switch to morning
finals and evening heats dictated that the swimming events were held over nine days. There was no precedence
for morning finals, the nearest thing to that being the three days of noon finals held at the Olympic Games in

Seoul, 1988.

The World Championships (25m), formerly known officially (and still widely referred to) as World Short-Course
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Championships, has all the same events as its more prestigious long-course cousin, plus a 100m medley for
both sexes. The event was held over four days from 1993 to 2004 and over five days from 2006. The short-
course World Cup series, which from the early 1990s had been held in stages over the course of the northern
hemisphere winter months, was improved drastically with an agreement for the 2007-2009 seasons to host all
seven events on five continents over a period of just one month. The race schedule includes every event held at
the world short-course championships, minus team races.

CURRENT EVENTS

Olympic Games

Men and Women:

50m, 100m, 200m, 400m freestyle; 100m, 200m backstroke; 100m, 200m breaststroke; 100m, 200m butterfly;
200m, 400m individual medley; 4 x 100m; 4 x 200m freestyle; 4x 100m medley.

Men: 1,500m freestyle. Women: 800m freestyle.

World Championship

Men and Women:

50m, 100m, 200m, 400m, 800m, 1,500m freestyle; 50m, 100m, 200m backstroke; 50m, 100m, 200m
breaststroke; 50m, 100m, 200m butterfly; 200m, 400m individual medley; 4x100m, 4x200m freestyle; 4x100m
medley.

World Championship (25m)

Men and Women:

50m, 100m, 200m, 400m freestyle; 50m, 100m, 200m backstroke; 50m, 100m, 200m breaststroke; 50m 100m,
200m butterfly; 100m 200m, 400m individual medley; 4x100m, 4x200m freestyle; 4x100m medley.
Men: 1,500m freestyle. Women: 800m freestyle.

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