

The practice of reducing exercise in the days just before an important competition is called tapering. Typically, an athlete goes through a cycle of training in which the body is overloaded with work in the beginning and middle segments of the cycle, and then the workload is decreased in the final stage as the swimmer approaches competition.
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However, some professional swimmers who do not hold a national or world ranking are considered the best in regard to their technical skills. Swimming in competition should create the least resistance in order to obtain maximum speed. The goal of high level competitive swimming is to break personal or world records while beating competitors in any given event. Katie Ledecky set the Olympic records in 2016 for the 400m and 800m freestyle.Ĭompetitive swimming became popular in the 19th century. Butterfly was developed in the 1930s and was at first a variant of breaststroke, until it was accepted as a separate style in 1952. Women's swimming was introduced into the Olympics in 1912 the first international swim meet for women outside the Olympics was the 1922 Women's Olympiad. In 1908, the world swimming association, Fédération Internationale de Natation (FINA), was formed. In 1902, the Australian Richmond Cavill introduced freestyle to the Western world. Men's swimming became part of the first modern Olympic Games in 1896 in Athens. The world's first women's swimming championship was held in Scotland in 1892. The first European amateur swimming competitions were in 1889 in Vienna. Other European countries also established swimming federations Germany in 1882, France in 1890 and Hungary in 1896. His feat was not replicated or surpassed for the next 36 years, until T.W. Using the breaststroke technique, he swam the channel 21.26 miles (34.21 km) in 21 hours and 45 minutes. Ĭaptain Matthew Webb was the first man to swim the English Channel (between England and France), in 1875. His stroke is still regarded as the most powerful to use today. Sir John Arthur Trudgen picked up the hand-over stroke from some South American natives and successfully debuted the new stroke in 1873, winning a local competition in England. In 1844 two Native American participants at a swimming competition in London introduced the front crawl to a European audience. Burgess across the English Channel, in 18, respectively. The recreational activity grew in popularity and by 1880, when the first national governing body, the Amateur Swimming Association was formed, there were already over 300 regional clubs in operation across the country. By 1837, the National Swimming Society was holding regular swimming competitions in six artificial swimming pools, built around London. In 1828, the first indoor swimming pool, St George's Baths was opened to the public. Swimming emerged as a competitive recreational activity in the 1830s in England. In 1538, Nikolaus Wynmann, a Swiss–German professor of languages, wrote the earliest known complete book about swimming, Colymbetes, sive de arte natandi dialogus et festivus et iucundus lectu ( The Swimmer, or A Dialogue on the Art of Swimming and Joyful and Pleasant to Read). Written references date from 2000 BC, with some of the earliest references to swimming including the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Bible, Beowulf, the Quran and others. Detail from a painting by Bernard Picart.Įvidence of recreational swimming in prehistoric times has been found, with the earliest evidence dating to Stone Age paintings from around 10,000 years ago. Although it is possible for competitive swimmers to incur several injuries from the sport, such as tendinitis in the shoulders or knees, there are also multiple health benefits associated with the sport. There are also regulations on what types of swimsuits, caps, jewelry and injury tape that are allowed at competitions. Swimming each stroke requires a set of specific techniques in competition, there are distinct regulations concerning the acceptable form for each individual stroke.

A medley relay consists of four swimmers who will each swim a different stroke, ordered as backstroke, breaststroke, butterfly and freestyle. In addition to these individual events, four swimmers can take part in either a freestyle or medley relay. Competitive swimming is one of the most popular Olympic sports, with varied distance events in butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, freestyle, and individual medley. The sport takes place in pools or open water (e.g., in a sea or lake). Swimming is an individual or team racing sport that requires the use of one's entire body to move through water.
