It seems to me that all the complicated rules around breaststroke and butterfly boil down to “swim with these artificially imposed limitations, so you won’t go as fast as you could, but do it as fast as you can, and we’ll watch you carefully to make sure you don’t get rid of too much of the built-in inefficiencies”.
Backstroke? Okay, sure. That more or less makes intuitive sense. But otherwise, I don’t understand why we’re not just asking these superb athletes to, basically, “swim like you would if you were being chased by a shark”. Just as Usain Bolt is basically given the task “run straight in that direction, as fast as you can, as though you were being chased by a bear and there was a safe refuge 100m away”.
Freestyle, of course, comes the closest: but then why are they limited in the distance they can go underwater? Wikipedia says without the limitation they might go the whole pool length without coming up. That strikes me as having an inherent problem of, you know, lack of oxygen. :eek: But I’d be perfectly fine with letting swimmers and coaches experiment and figure out the best balance. Just go as fast as you can! Which is already not that fast, really. It looks fast the way the water swirls by them, but these are not penguins or seals by any means: a sedentary senior citizen hurrying along with a suitcase to catch their train moves about the same speed or faster.
No, I can’t understand why all the different styles either. There should be freestyle at various distances. If you want to do butterfly then feel free to do so…I don’t reckon much for your chances though
Breaststroke, obviously, exists because it’s a great energy-conserving stroke for people who aren’t (or possibly aren’t yet) highly trained athletes who can simply freestyle and freestyle and freestyle all afternoon. Any public swimming pool you like, you’ll see people breaststroking back and forth everywhere you look, so why not have a race for it? Anyone who swims at all has certainly learnt it, and it’s a useful stroke.
It makes a lot more sense than ‘walking races’ , where you need eagle-eyed judges on the competitors at every moment making sure they’re not sliding into a run. You can’t “slide into” freestyle from breaststroke, so it’s easy to make it a separate event.
Butterfly … well, there, I haven’t a clue. I can’t butterfly, so I won’t speculate on what it’s good for, but you certainly don’t see much of it about, apart from in people who are trying to win races.
Because that’s the way the sport developed. It’s like asking why are there different classes of cars for drag racing with different rules for each? There’s no strictly logical explanation, but there’s no need for one.
The butterfly evolved out of the breaststroke, because they found they could go faster than using a standard breaststroke. By 1956, it turned into either eliminate the breaststroke, because everyone was butterflying, or split it off into a separate event.
Why freestyle doesn’t change into “swim anyway you want, and see who touches the wall first” I don’t know. ISTM that the idea that they would swim the whole length of the pool underwater is self-limiting - I wonder if it is even possible to swim an 800 or 1500 meter event and only take one or two breaths per lap, or however it would work out.
Given how Olympic sports proliferate, I don’t think they would change the freestyle rules. They would just create a whole new set of events and call it ‘unrestricted’, with 50 meter and 100 meter and 200 meter and 400 meter and 800 and 1500 and relays and medleys and individual medleys. And the Olympics would go on for months.
If its energy conservation is significant, there must be distances, presumably varying for different swimmers, at which it becomes advantaged for that reason? So have races up through and beyond that range of distances.
The breaststroke is how many people swim, it keeps your head above water, it’s not very efficient though. Yes people swim the crawl at the pool, but watch most people and they will do a basic breaststroke when being lazy.
Butterfly came about when someone realized that they could recover their arms over the water instead of under the water by the rules at the time, making them faster. The butterfly used to use the breaststroke kick, which is no longer allowed. Once it was understood that the new overarm stroke was much faster they added the butterfly as a new stroke. The original Individual Medley was backstroke, breast and free.
They limit the amount of distance underwater for free, back and fly to 15 meters, because otherwise you can move underwater a hell of a lot faster. Watch the guy in this video as he blows the other swimmers out of the water. He was a second faster then the world record for the 50 meter back.
Because it’s boring to watch people dolphin kicking underwater. Sports have rules and traditions and that’s just the way it is. Looking for reason is not going to be a satisfying search.
Don’t have a real answer for that one. Probably to even the playing field. The guy in the video isn’t really doing backstroke, he just happens to be on his back. It could also be a safety thing too, there have been a handful of people who have died trying to swim the entire length of the pool underwater. It’s a practice they have stopped in the last couple of years for age group swimming, they used to have the kids swim a few laps underwater from time to time.
Personally, I’d like to see swimming races with unrestricted gear (well, except for powered propulsion). So I’d allow low-drag clothing, flippers, hand-webbing, etc and even bottled oxygen, if they thought it improved their speed.
I’m curious how fast humans can propel themselves through water.
Yup, breast stroke is very efficient but not that fast, and even though I used to do both the butterfly and breast stroke on the swim team I had no idea why anyone invented such a thing as the butterfly …
… but I guess that explains it. I don’t recall butterfly times being any better than breaststroke though, but we were just kids.
I remember something like that, flippers, maybe some kind of hand flippers, but no air supply, but I think some kind of tilted back snorkels were used. I don’t think it was so much a race as just trying to find out how fast people could travel through the water. Maybe it was some kind of Popular Science article or something, long ago though.
Butterfly is significantly faster than breaststroke. Butterfly is the second fastest stroke (behind crawl) and breaststroke is the slowest by a pretty large margin.
WR Times:
[ol]
[li]Freestyle 100M - 46.91[/li][li]Butterfly 100M - 49.82[/li][li]Backstroke 100M - 51.94[/li][li]Breaststroke 100M - 57.13[/li][/ol]
I’ve done 500m, not at those speeds but I’ve done it and I was about as far from being an athlete as you can get; I imagine that with some more training and less people getting in the middle I would have been able to reach 800m like that. I always found it easier to swim underwater than on the surface.
We were nowhere close to those kind of times. I do remember butterfly makes it easier to breath because the down stroke with the arms naturally lifts your head up.
NASCAR uses speed-limiting devices on its cars. Perhaps the swimming organizers are worried about the possibility of swimmers careening out of the pool into the spectators following a collision.
