The butterfly effect

I occasionally see articles on social media which begin with “I was today years old when..” and then list some fact that the person has only just discovered, such as all polar bears are right-handed or that “eleven plus two” is an anagram of ”twelve plus one”.

Sometimes these facts are trivial, sometimes important and sometimes erroneous. Sometimes it merely serves, as is so often with the internet, as an opportunity for someone to demonstrate their ignorance of something which every other person on the planet already knows. I may be about to add to their number but here goes…

(Sorry, do you want a moment to go and check the anagram thing? It’s OK, I’ll wait…

…see? It’s a good one isn’t it?)

Anyway, my own insight into something which may be blindingly obvious to you came when I was watching a YouTube film of the 1936 Olympic breaststroke final. Apart from the unusual sight of Hitler having what appeared to be a jolly nice time, my interest was piqued by the swimmer in lane 3,

the American John Higgins, who was clearly doing the butterfly, not the breaststroke at all. And no-one seemed to notice this blatant disregard for the rules.

Officials weren’t trying to pull him from the water, the coaches of other swimmers weren’t crying foul; the crowd were cheering and clapping rather than booing and hissing. All very odd I thought. How did Higgins manage to pull off such obvious cheating using an incorrect stroke like this?

The answer, of course, was that, within the laws of the competition at that time, he wasn’t breaking any rule at all. Neither was he really doing the butterfly come to that.

He was using a conventional breaststroke kick but with a double overarm recovery. It was unconventional and groundbreaking but certainly not illegal.

Why had no one thought to borrow the butterfly arm recovery before? Well, the answer in part is (and this is where my “I was today years old… moment kicked in) that butterfly as a stroke did not exist in 1936.

I’d never really given it much thought before but I had assumed that the main strokes used today had been around for hundreds of years. Breaststroke, or something like it, seems fairly intuitive for anyone finding themselves unexpectedly chucked in water. Descriptions exist of the stroke going back as far as the 17th Century. Likewise, backstroke seems a sensible option for anyone struggling to breathe in water (although in fact it only became a competition stroke at the beginning of the last Century. I know there are cave paintings and Roman reliefs depicting a front crawl stroke and, I think I assumed that butterfly had a similar ancient heritage.

However, the 1930s saw the authorities debate the legality of this new double arm recovery.

Eventually, after the American coach, the almost perfectly named David Armbruster, added a dolphin kick to the stroke, the officials decided that this was indeed a completely different stroke and recognised it as such in 1953.

As I say, maybe I’m the last to know, but I had no idea that, when I was born, the butterfly was only ten years old. Which raises the intriguing question of whether more strokes are waiting to be invented perhaps even more efficient and faster than the ones used today.

When I go to the gym I always take a few moments to look down on the folk swimming in the pool as it provides the perfect vantage point from which to observe and the decide how the various techniques being demonstrated might be improved. The other day I saw a lady progressing along quite happily using a method I had never seen before. She was on her back, using a breaststroke kick and an upsidedown butterfly arm recovery. Was she, I wondered, an innovator about to introduce a whole new stroke to the world?

Maybe.

But maybe not.

She wasn’t going terribly fast (not that she was trying to) but, more importantly for her, and indeed anyone trying something new, was that it looked remarkably uncomfortable. And that’s clincher really. If you are swimming but moving your body in a way in which it is not designed to do then inefficiency will be the immediate result and, more importantly, serious injury is likely to occur in the longer term.

This is why safe and natural body movements are the watchword for SwimMastery coaches.

Innovation and development are all very well but never to the detriment of the swimmers’ health. So before you experiment with an underwater arm recovery with a huge scissors kick or a rotating arm movement reminiscent of an old fashioned lawn mower it might be better to pause and work on perfecting the existing strokes rather than try to lend your name to posterity with a radical new method which ultimately does more harm than good.

And, by the way, I was wrong earlier. Polar bears are all left-handed