SWIMMING

Hi guys! I’m Nicolo’, in this post today I want to talk about my favourite sport: swimming.

Swimming is an individual sport. Competitive swimming is one of the most popular Olympic sports, with events in butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, freestyle and individual medley. In addition to these individual sport, Olympic swimmers also take part in relays. Swimmers can compete in open-water events, for example in a sea or lake.

HISTORY

The first signs of this discipline date back to the Cave of Swimmers in Gilf Kebir, where there are paintings of people swimming with movements similar to the ones we have today. A clay seal dated between 9000 and 4000 shows four swimmers crawling. In Europe competitive swimming started in 1800, with the backstroke. In 1873 the crawl was introduced, copied from the ”Amerindi”. Initially the butterfly was a variation of the breaststroke style, only in 1952,it was added officially. The first very famous Italian swimmers were Enrico Paoli and Carlo Pedersol, also called Bud Spencer. Pedersoli was the first Italian who defeated the Italian record at freestyle 100mt.

FUNDAMENTALS

START

The start takes place at the poolside, indicated by loudspeaker. The start in butterfly , breaststroke and freestyle is in the starting block, outside the water, while in backstroke, the start is inside the water and the swimmer has to hang on to handle of the block. There are two kinds of starts:

• Track start

• Grab start

TURN

There are several types of turns, but I’ll show you only three of these:

• The turn of freestyle provides a contact with the wall, by any parts of the body; in general most athletes do a kind of “flip” 

• The turn of backstroke is similar , but recently the regulations allow also the “backflip” 

• The turn of breaststroke and butterfly are less difficult, because it’s simply “touch and start again”.

Nicolò