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.
Many people swim as a form of exercise. Fly is exercising different muscles and allows me to get my 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
Like, why is being good at a deliberately-inefficent form of movement worth a medal in only this one case?
> 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.
There's no real way to compare the butterfly and the forward crawl that doesn't make the butterfly look like a ridiculous farce.
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""
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.
If that's how we judge things, there should only be races on bicycles.
I would prefer that shoes be restricted to designs that don't allow for higher efficiency than barefoot running, but sport rules tend to lag technology advances.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abebe_Bikila
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike_Vaporfly_and_Tokyo_2020_O...
World Athletics defines the rules for shoes in most running events. They're limited to a stack height of 20mm or 40mm depending on the event (along with certain other limits).
https://worldathletics.org/about-iaaf/documents/book-of-rule...
AtlasBarfed•1h ago