The history of butterfly swimming | Hacker News Reader

The history of butterfly swimming

swimming.org

34 pointsmooreds28 comments

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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""

>deliberately-inefficent

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

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.

No, if efficiency can be used to evaluate if a sport is legit, only cycling should be allowed. No running or swimming. The point is that efficiency is an asinine ground to judge a sport on.

Agreed. Wasn't track barefoot back in the day? I mean even shoes are an advantage. Swimming sped up after goggles and swimcaps were accepted. I think it's all just where do you decide to draw the line? I've thought badminton is an odd sport, the shuttlecock is so slow anyone can (normally) play it - it's very inefficient. And don't get me started on equestrian if grandpa can win it then shouldn't the horse get the medal?

For sprints, shoes give additional traction for faster starts, but don't increase running efficiency. For distance events, shoes were just extra weight, and barefoot runners have won Olympic competitions.[1] Recently, springy "super shoe" designs have shown up.[2] They've been banned from most competitions, but it looks like less effective versions of the design are still allowed under current rules.

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...

The economic survival of running as an elite or professional sport depends on sponsorship from shoe companies. So super shoes aren't going to be banned. It's too late to go back.

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...

Finswimming is actually a separate sport, just not an olympic sport. Although it has some exciting characteristics like very fast 50 meter races, which I enjoy as a "regular" (non-fins) swimmer.

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.

There are much bigger problems with the Olympics than that. Such as selling the rights and advertising for billions while paying the athletes nothing.

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

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.

You’re familiar with the walking competition?

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com