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Comment by irishcoffee | Hacker News Reader

I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that this isn't even remotely new. Anyone who's watched the olympics knows they do the first 25-40m underwater for the butterfly or IM.

Hell, 20 years ago when I was on swim team I did the first 20m underwater. Not sure why this is "new."

Edit: yes I read the article. Doing it on your side is also not new. Has nobody ever watched the olympics?

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As per the article there has been a 15m underwater limit off each wall in butterfly, freestyle, and backstroke since 1998. Though the article doesn't state it there was a 10m limit in backstroke 1988, that was relaxed to 15m in 1991. The rule change was spurred after David Berkoff and Daichi Suzuki[1] battled in the 100 backstroke in the 88 olympics going mostly underwater on the first length[2]. Though FINA said it was for safety concerns, it was more likely that they wanted the strokes to be preserved and not have swimming boil down to a breath holding contest.

[1] http://swimswam.com/david-berkoff-daichi-suzukis-underwater-... [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztDlHwqD7pA

Did you ever see Denis Pankratov do his underwater? Back in the day he was truly unbelievable!! It's too bad there are limits on the underwater portion, the cameras they have on the pools now are really great at capturing the underwaters and I don't think much would be lost unless you're not able to watch it on screen. But on freestyle there are no limits on anything except pushing off the bottom, so if you wanted to chance it I wonder if someone could try and win the 50 fr with a fish kick?

In freestyle some part of the swimmer must still break the surface by the 15m mark. Otherwise, people would probably go farther for shorter distance events (50 and 100).

If you read the article there is more to it than just staying under water. The stroke is basically like the dolphin kick on your side. They mention that it may be more efficient because you are able to pull in more water laterally than vertically due to not breaking the surface of the water, or having vortices hit the ground. It would be interesting to see if this could actually impact swimmers in other lanes.

Most racing pools are deep enough that you can do it vertically and not have to worry excessively about either the surface of the water or the pool bottom.

Plus, if you tried to do this in a race horizontally, you'd be fighting against the vortexes of your competitors, which would make the attempt even more rough and inefficient (for the leader as well).

This was exactly my reaction after looking at the article. Mastering underwater dolphin kick has been critical to success at the national and international level since the late 1990s.

Yeah, that was my initial reaction as well. It looks like she flexes at her shoulders more than I'm used to seeing, but nothing groundbreaking.

We've known that a dolphin kick is faster than any of the strokes for a long while.

I haven't ever seen someone do it sideways, but I suppose that's probably because it's more difficult to keep going straight.

So, you didn't read the article then? It's about the 'fish kick', which is like an underwater dolphin kick, but on your side.

The staying under water thing is according to the the article about 30-40 years old. That to me is extremely new. After all we've been swimming for thousands of years.

Yes... until you take into account that this is only really useful for swim races, and is not really practical for 'survival' swimming.

Its a very difficult to learn swim technique that is really only useful when you are trying to maximize your speed very slightly over a very small distance to the extent you are willing to give up your ability to breath.

'Regular' swim strokes give you the ability to continue for large distances and to breath while you swim...

But people have been doing recreational running for thousands of years. Are you implying that competitive swimming is new?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_hunting

Okay, you really want to misinterpret this, don't you.

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