The history of butterfly swimming (swimming.org)
18 points by mooreds 3 days ago
dan_sbl 31 minutes ago
> unveiling it to the confusion of officials and competitors in a 150 yard medley race in 1933
The article doesn't say, but did the medley relay/IM become a 4 stroke event around the same time in 1952 when FINA recognized it as a new stroke? Funny to see a 150 yard event mentioned since it seems like such an odd distance nowadays.
dfee 2 hours ago
butterfly is interesting because it's faster than breaststroke (mentioned) but slower than freestyle. it also consumes far more energy than any other stroke.
to that end, i'm not sure why it exists, except that it's truly a unique style.
* i also still hold my high school's butterfly record, 20 years on.
slwvx 40 minutes ago
> to that end, i'm not sure why it exists, except that it's truly a unique style.
Many people swim as a form of exercise. Fly is exercising different muscles and allows me to get heart rate up higher than freestyle
Fly is useful to train for other strokes
Perhaps more importantly, I think that having a different stroke to do makes swimming more interesting. Whether doing sets as part of a swim team or on your own, it's more interesting when you can vary things. The more swimming is interesting, the easier it is to enjoy and keep doing it
sleepydog 33 minutes ago
The modern Olympics is at least as much for entertainment as it is for measuring human ability, and the butterfly is simply an awe-inspiring technique. The line of swimmers repeatedly shooting out of the water like flying fish is mesmerizing. Who cares if they're not going as fast as freestyle?
forinti an hour ago
I think the objective is to show how strong you are. If you wanna go fast, use freestyle, if you want to conserve energy, use breaststroke or backstroke. I don't see a reason to use the butterfly outside of a butterfly competition.
Contax 21 minutes ago
In my case the reason is to exercise. I really like it as an exercise. Though I also practice the other strokes for more variety, and fun, when I'm short of time butterfly is my choice.
Bratmon an hour ago
I never quite understood why there are Olympic medals for Butterfly swimming, but not things like "100m hop-on-one-foot sprint"
Like, why is being good at a deliberately-inefficent form of movement worth a medal in only this one case?
DennisP 25 minutes ago
That's a funny take and I'm tempted to agree, since butterfly was the bane of my existence as a skinny swimmer in high school. But hopping on one foot was never a rule hack that gave you an advantage in some preexisting event. Butterfly was, and rather than banning it they made it a new event. Plus it looks cool, if you're a lot better at it than I was.
Angostura 19 minutes ago
You’re familiar with the walking competition?
ggreer an hour ago
This quirk of competition is why swimmers can win a ridiculous number of medals. If swimming only had freestyle, Michael Phelps would have 7 gold medals instead of 23.
forinti an hour ago
The first modern Olympics did have sack races. That would be entertaining.
gosub100 an hour ago
There are much bigger problems with the Olympics than that. Such as selling the rights and advertising for billions while paying the athletes nothing.
skinfaxi an hour ago
Deliberately-inefficient compared to what? TFA leads with:
> Swimmers and coaches began to realise that breaststroke was quicker when a swimmer recovered their arms forward above the water and the arm technique – as well as the swimming term ‘butterfly’ – was born.
marttt an hour ago
This whole story somehow reminds me of the Fosbury flop technique in high jump -- amazingly, Dick Fosbury started to develop it at the age of 16: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Fosbury#High_school_and_t...
From the Wikipedia article on Fosbury:
"The technique gained the name the "Fosbury Flop" when in 1964 the Medford Mail-Tribune ran a photo captioned "Fosbury Flops Over Bar," while in an accompanying article a reporter wrote that he looked like "a fish flopping in a boat." Others were even less kind, with one newspaper captioning Fosbury's photograph, "World's Laziest High Jumper""
Bratmon an hour ago
I noticed the article pointedly didn't compare the stroke to the forward crawl, which is clearly both faster and more efficient.
There's no real way to compare the butterfly and the forward crawl that doesn't make the butterfly look like a ridiculous farce.
john_strinlai an hour ago
the butterfly stroke is the most energy-inefficient stroke, i believe, despite being quicker.
tokai an hour ago
>deliberately-inefficent
If that's how we judge things, there should only be races on bicycles.
ggreer an hour ago
Allowing a bicycle would be like if swimming competitions allowed fins. A more accurate mapping to the swimming strokes would be race walking, which is widely ridiculed.
jolt42 an hour ago
polyrand 33 minutes ago
tokai an hour ago
AtlasBarfed 2 hours ago
Butterfly is the "three point shot" of swimming. If you can do a pool length of butterfly you are a "real" swimmer, kind of like a non-prayer three point shot implies you actually played basketball.