And events be defined by solely by distance, like in running? Or you can swim as you please for any distance. I find events defined by the type of stroke too variegated to really define swimming as a sport. Well, that’s me.
Keep in mind that “freestyle” isn’t exactly free-for-all. You have to break the water surface after a couple meters. You could be faster if you stayed submerged for longer, but that’s considered too dangerous.
Also, you have long-distance running and walking at the Olympics.
Aside from running and walking, you also have hurdles, steeplechase, jumping for height, jumping for distance, jumping with a stick, and throwing various objects. These are all defined under the rubric of “athletics” or “track and field”.
This is a good list, but hurdles, steeplechase, long jump, triple jump and pole-vaulting all involve running. Even high jumping does not restrict the speed of your approach to walking pace.
So the only type of track event that doesn’t allow running is walking. (Personally I think this is a silly event, requiring judging every step of every athlete to ensure they’re not being more efficient. :smack:)
All throwing events are classified as field, rather than track. I suppose javelin throwers jog a bit, but considering they have to soon stop abruptly, in my opinion they’re not ‘running’.
So I vote for just allowing any swimming stroke (by all means limit the underwater stuff as dangerous) and therefore just having the various distances, rather than various strokes.
And throw out walking too!
Why?
We can make the same argument about most ball games as well. Why should we have such a variety? Why have soccer, in which the point is to get the ball in the goal, and field hockey, in which the point is to get the ball in the goal, and team handball, in which the point is to get the ball in the goal, and basketball, in which the point is to get the ball in the goal, when the only difference is the specific ways in which you are allowed to get the ball in the goal? ( well, that and the placement/size of the goal. ) Why require some players to use sticks and forbid others from using sticks? Why do some games permit players to use their hands, while others require them not to use their hands?
Seems like a lot of duplication and inefficiency! Let’s just have one ball game. I vote for that if we are going to have only one swimming stroke.
Gotta be Calvinball. That way we still get the variety. But only once.
Everybody in the world has to marry the same person as well. Can’t have any variety! Abolish every fast food chain except In-N-Out. All cars are Chevys, and they only come in pale green.
We can kick all the rest of you off this message board, too. Mine is the only opinion that matters.
I’d agree, the number of medals given out for swimming events is ridiculous, something like 90+ at the last games.
Split it by gender, split it by distance, add in a couple of relays and we are done.
It is the equivalent of having the 100m run, the 100m hop, the 100m backwards run, the 100m skip, the 200m run, the 200m hop…etc etc.
I’m sure some nations have a vested interest in coining in the medals from the diverse swimming events but I don’t see the attraction.
It’s not just the Olympics. That’s the way organized swimming is, with people specialising in strokes and distances. It’s not really fair to those athletes that having been working all their lives to perfect their butterfly, and then arbitrarily eliminate it from the highest level of competition just because you personally have no interest in it. Don’t like it? Don’t watch it!
I don’t think anyone is saying we should ban the different strokes, people should be free to use whatever stroke they like and perform it in whatever style they like in order to cover the relevant distance.
You want to perfect the butterfly and enter a competition? go for it.
Crawl is the fasted stroke over any distance, so you’d be effectively reducing swimming to just that.
You could make the case for this, why use less efficient strokes when trying to find the fastest swimmer? But if you follow that model you’d eliminate all but one “free-for-all” style martial arts, lots of track and field events (hurdles and steeplechase obstacles are just there to slow runners down), and all the sliding on snow events would be combined (do we really need ski cross and boardercross? How about luge, skeleton, and bobsled?), etc.
But why? Swimming disciplines are firmly ingrained as part of the sport and dropping events from the Olympics wouldn’t change the way swimming events are practiced anywhere else. It would just reward the freestyle specialists at the expense of everyone else.
That’s already an event. That’s what freestyle is now. You can swim any stroke you want in freestyle, even strokes that don’t have their own sanctioned events, like sidestroke. It’s just that the crawl is the fastest stroke, generally speaking, so anyone swimming freestyle swims crawl. Once in a while you might see someone swimming backstroke in a freestyle event, but not at Olympic levels.
This proposal is effectively the same as banning all other strokes.
Which is exactly what happened; “freestyle” events allow the swimmers to use whatever stroke they choose, but all of them choose the crawl since it’s fastest. Freestyle is more or less synonymous with the crawl these days as a result.
Ab-so-lutely!
I’m not saying we should ban soccer or basketball; people should be free to kick the ball if they like or shoot it into a little circle 10’ above ground level to score. But they should just be aware that everyone else is allowed to pick up the ball and run with it in order to score the greater number of points (by getting it into a ground-level goal some ten feet high and twenty feet wide or whatever).
You want to perfect your kicking technique or free throw skills and try out for the team? go for it!
(For people who swim competitively, the difference between backstroke and breaststroke, say, really is quite large–not as large as the difference between soccer and basketball, but larger than most people think. While world-class freestylers are often world-class butterflyers as well, the overlap between the other strokes is not as strong, and breaststroke, in particular, is a very different animal.)
Even in high school–and my HS was not exactly a Swimming Powerhouse in a Powerhouse League–I never once saw this.
I was a backstroker primarily, but when I did swim freestyle events either individually or in relays, I always used “front crawl” (not that anyone ever called it that). Why? because even for a backstroke specialist like m, freestyle was faster.
My kids’s swim coach tells them that he once coached a kid whose backstroke was fastrer than most people’s crawl, and so that’s what he swam. I never saw it myself, no idea if he’s telling tall tales or not.
**Should Olympic swimming be limited to just one stroke? **
You better make the pool a lot shorter if you do that.
Do those other strokes have any advantage at all? If so, then create events where there’s an actual incentive to use those strokes. Like, if some strokes are more energy-efficient than others, then have a marathon swim event where the crawlers would be too exhausted to finish it. And if those other strokes don’t have any advantages, then why care about them at all? Yes, yes, we have competitive racewalking, but we might as well not: It’s regarded as a joke, and nobody ever actually watches it.
Yes, I’m fully aware of all of that. Purely an opinion of course.