The history of butterfly swimming

https://www.swimming.org/sport/history-of-butterfly/

by mooreds • 1 month ago

34 28 1 month 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.

dfee• 1 month 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.

forinti2• 1 month 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• 1 month 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.

slwvx• 1 month 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 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

sleepydog• 1 month 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?

ge96• 1 month ago

Funny I hated swimming but I was good at it, also did butterfly and freestyle. Everyone had to do the 500 at least once, that was brutal.

Bratmon2• 1 month 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?

skinfaxi• 1 month 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.

john_strinlai• 1 month ago

the butterfly stroke is the most energy-inefficient stroke, i believe, despite being quicker.

Bratmon2• 1 month 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.

marttt• 1 month 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""

tokai2• 1 month ago

deliberately-inefficent

If that's how we judge things, there should only be races on bicycles.

ggreer3• 1 month 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.

ggreer3• 1 month 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.

gosub100• 1 month 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.

forinti2• 1 month ago

The first modern Olympics did have sack races. That would be entertaining.

DennisP• 1 month 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• 1 month ago

You’re familiar with the walking competition?

polyrand2• 1 month ago

I believe that's like saying we should only have a single "throw" event in athletics. Or why having hurdles events when you already have regular running ones.

I like that we can have more variety, more people competing, and overall different modalities to test human performance.

dan_sbl• 1 month 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.

garciasn• 1 month ago

1960 Olympics was the first where fly was added to the MR.

pseingatl• 1 month ago

The article fails to mention that until the 1970's, the frog kick was a legal kick when swimming butterfly. After that, the dolphin kick became mandatory. Doc Councilman's _The Science of Swimming_ was not mentioned. I don't have a copy handy, band I would bet the stroke is discussed extensively.

The history of butterfly swimming

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