This text initially appeared within the 2024 Olympic Preview version of SwimSwam Journal, courtesy of writer Aglaia Pezzato. Subscribe to the SwimSwam Journal right here.
In 2022, almost two years from the start of the Paris Video games, the brand new swimming competitors program was introduced. The schedule was prolonged and expanded to 9 days of competitions, plus two days devoted to open water marathons. 9 days out of 16 whole days of the Olympics. (if we exclude the day devoted to the opening ceremony and a few rounds of tournaments which might be held earlier than the official begin). Swimming, due to this fact, occupies greater than half of the Olympic time, albeit sharing this area with quite a few different sports activities however realizing that plenty of media consideration is concentrated on the pool finals. 9 days to decree 35 Olympic titles: 17 feminine, 17 male, and one combined. The newest addition to the Olympic program was the 4×100 combined medley, launched on the Tokyo 2020 version together with parity within the longer freestyle occasions that now see each women and men competing within the 800 and 1500.
Though we are actually accustomed to pondering and defining some occasions as Olympic distances, and particularly contemplating with some skepticism those who stay non-Olympic such because the 50 breaststroke, backstroke, or butterfly, we must always not think about that the Olympic program has all the time been as we see it at the moment — fairly the alternative.
Let’s begin from the start, particularly from the primary fashionable version of the Olympic Video games, Athens 1896. On this event, there have been 4 swimming occasions, reserved just for male athletes, like all the opposite disciplines of this primary Olympic version, which passed off on April 11, 1896, within the bay of Zea, within the chilly waters (13°C/55°F) and tough sea close to Piraeus, Greece. Almost 20,000 spectators attended the races. The distances in this system had been 100 meters, 100 meters for sailors, 500 meters, and 1200 meters.
The swimming race reserved for sailors (completely Greek) is a curious competitors by no means repeated in Olympic disciplines. It ought to be famous that the winner, Ioannis Malokinis, swam the 100-meter freestyle in a time virtually double that of Hajós, the winner of the race for a similar distance open to all. There was additionally speculated to be a 500-meter freestyle race for sailors, however it was not held for unknown causes.
After the primary version of 1896, for a couple of extra years Olympic swimming experimented with distances and kinds of races that now sound unusual to us, equivalent to underwater swimming in Paris 1900, the place the consequence was a rating mixed from the meters swum and the time of apnea endurance. The self-discipline had little success as a result of spectators couldn’t see the progress of the race, and it was faraway from this system. Paris 1900 was additionally the one version for the 200-meter impediment race, which consisted of climbing a pole, passing over a row of boats, after which swimming again below the boats.
The 1904 version in St. Louis was the one event when races had been held in yards, creating Olympic champions with weird distances just like the 880-yd. freestyle or 440-yd. breaststroke, largely borrowed from the American requirements in athletics on the time (as a result of they had been roughly equal to their meters-based cousins).
To see ladies compete in an Olympic program for the primary time, we needed to wait till 1912, in Stockholm. On that event, 27 swimmers representing seven nations made their debut in the one particular person race scheduled, the 100 freestyle. 4 groups as a substitute took half within the 4×100 freestyle relay.
To see a program actually like what we’re used to seeing at the moment, we have to leap to Mexico Metropolis 1968 when 11 new occasions had been launched in comparison with Tokyo ’64, bringing the whole to fifteen males’s and 14 ladies’s occasions. The one variations remaining had been the 800 freestyle reserved for ladies, the 1500 freestyle for males, and the 4×200 freestyle relay, which was just for males. The 4×200 freestyle relay for ladies on the Video games was launched in Atlanta 1996.
At the moment, the World Championships program differs from the Olympics because of the presence of the 50-meter breaststroke, backstroke, butterfly, and in some continental competitions such because the Europeans, combined freestyle relays.
We have no idea if the IOC will once more increase the already very in depth Olympic program, however for positive loads has modified within the water below the Olympic rings’ shadow.
