Amazing! This is about the dolphin kick performed on its side, rechristened “the fish kick.” I couldn’t fathom (ha) why the same kick rotated 90 degrees could be faster but it turns out that the kicking motion is constrained by the motion of the water around it. In the dolphin kick, the water moves up and down and is limited by the water’s surface and pool’s bottom. The swimmer frees themself of these constraints by turning on their side.
Middle lanes are faster, and for some reason swimmer with the fastest record gets the middle in most events, which always seemed weird to me -- it's a positive feedback system. Seems like you should give the advantage to the people who are behind, not ahead... but that's common in sports and in modern society for some reason.
Giving advantages to the better participants is a practice common across a variety of racing sports. The idea being that, if you could earn an advantage by doing worse, then in a race where you know at a certain point that you can't medal anyway, it would be optimal to just intentionally slow down to try to come in last and secure an advantage in the next race.
I've heard this said before, and I understand the reasoning, but I don't think it's good enough. We should be aiming for equality at the start of a race, not giving the better people a head start. If qualifying races are broken in the way, then just randomize the starting order. Literally do a random draw as people are walking/driving up to the start. It would make the events far more interesting as well.
As a counterpoint, think about the balancing act of trying to place as well as you can in the semifinals while not over-exhausting yourself to the point where you've got no energy left for the final.
I think this dynamic is way more interesting than what you'd get if semifinal rankings had no impact ; that latter scenario would basically result in a Dutch auction on effort, and likely suppress performance on the qualifying races.
Let’s consider auto sport. For most races, there are fixed starting positions that are determined by qualifying. Qualification is generally done by racing around the track as fast as you can without any other racer on the track or blocking you. The faster you qualify, the better your starting position. The better your starting position, the more advantage you have in the main race. If you are trying to figure out who the better racer is, it’s not a bad system. Everyone is incentivized to do as well as they can at each step.
But, I think there is another motivation to consider. I don’t think the point is necessarily to find the best racer (or swimmer in your case). Instead, I think the point may be to make it so that the best swimmers can swim their best race. The goal isn’t just to see who can win, but to see if the winners can beat a larger record. You want the best racers to have the best chance at performing their best. When the best swimmers are in the middle lanes, they have the best conditions for breaking other records.
It’s not the most fair system. Track is probably a little better, but even then, the lane you are in has certain advantages and disadvantages.
You could make it based on past performance at a given level. So your position in a qualifying race depends on your placement in last year's qualifying race. Your position at the final Olympic event depends on your placement at the same event in the last Olympics.
If it's your first time at a given event, I guess keep whatever we do now or make it random. The reason for this system would be to make surprise wins from less-known people more likely, which I'd think would be desirable.
It’s not strange at all. People want to see records broken. Levelling the playing field works against that goal.
Sports is an aspirational medium of entertainment. People want to see excellence. They want to see dynasties. Too much fairness and balance leads to loss of interest.
Look at the NBA. We’re in a period of unprecedented parity and balance. It seems like every year brings a different championship team. Ratings are way down and loads of people are complaining about the CBA which was written with the goal of bringing more parity to the league, a goal it’s quite obviously achieving!
Not always. Some of the most prestigious horse races in the UK, US, and Australia ar handicap races. The horse that is most successful carries the most weight. The handicapper attempts to create a dead heat.
On the other hand the NFL’s hard salary cap and consequent parity is what has made it the most popular US professional sporting league. People in the US don’t want to see big markets buy their way to championships.
as an adult the NFL is the most watchable professional sport for me, despite my city having no NFL team. every year I can just choose a playoff bound team to root for based on their style or storyline. And each game is meaningful whereas the other professional sports have regular seasons that just drag on and on. also love the one and done knockout playoff format.
I know that's the narrative about the NBA lately but it's just that - narrative.
It's far from proven that the short-lived "parity" that has emerged in the aftermath of the KD Warriors dynasty is the cause of down ratings.
I do personally dislike it though and find the parity via CBA to be artificial. It just causes continuity on a contender to be untenable.
And continuity is what makes for good basketball, hence why dynasties are so fun to watch. It's not just that they win, a lot. It's that they have a consistent style of play with a consistent cast of players (stars and role players) that fans get to know over the course of those dynastic years.
It also focuses the race around the center of the pool which works from a visual standpoint. Favorites in the middle, dark horses surrounding at the edge
IIRC Ecclestone suggested getting rid of qualifiers and just putting the F1 cars n the inverse order of their last race. This idea was in order to get more overtakes (the best parts of F1 races). I think it would be great.
There was a period in World Rally Championship history when the top drivers would manipulate the starting order for the following day's stages by intentionally slowing down before the end of the stage. It was bizarre to watch teams intentionally give up 10+ second margins when stage wins can come down to half-second gaps.
In the BTCC, there was a similar situation for a while: in one of the races, the best-perfoming half of the pack would start at the back of the grid, and the worst-performing half at the front of the grid - but in-order within the two groups. However, since 2006 there has been some randomness added to the grid positioning, which makes attempting to manipulate it a risky business.
Just thinking if it's done F1 style it is fair. It's fresh at each competition.
If it's based on past times that creates possibly a feedback loop but depends on details. E.g. can a swimmer use a non competition record towards their qualification.
Reminds me of the final boss in Smash Bros. If you purposefully let him whip you at first, the adaptive play would nerf him enough to let you easily finish him.
Track & Field races stagger the starting positions, to compensate for the outer lanes of the track being longer. American football has the teams switch goals every quarter, to even out the advantages of having the wind at your team's back.
Your examples are about making circumstances equivalent, thus canceling out any advantage. There's no way to e.g. switch lanes in swimming so we're bound to have some contestants advantaged.
In cases where some contestants have to be advantaged, the conventional solution in sports is to advantage the ones who performed better according to some metric.
I think it's unfair to reward those who were lucky or already advantaged somehow, but my wife who has a background in track and field thinks anything else would be unfair.
I believe the main reasoning why this is fair is that this advantage is earned.
Would it be fairer to use randomly assigned lane? Then you get almost equal competitors in advantageous and disadvantageous lanes?
Isn't the top result in a year also used for qualification purposes (and thus lane assignment) for top-level competitions? Basically, you earn a spot in the best lane throughout the calendar year.
When I hear of an advantage being earned, I imagine it would go to the one who has put in the most effort, or been most inventive. Here, it goes to the one with the best metric. Metrics are a proxy for effort/inventiveness, but far from perfect. (As any software developer in a large organisation can attest.)
> ... no way to e.g. switch lanes in swimming so ...
Why couldn't you shorten the pool, from a swimmer's PoV, by putting (say) a very shallow plywood box against the wall of the pool at one end of each "non-center" lane? Yes, you might need to do some math & stats to figure out just how shallow a box. Or, you could use a feedback loop - boxes start very shallow, leading swimmers get to pick a lane, boxes adjusted, repeat.
In US sports it is very common in the tournament for a single season, or in a single event to reward better performance earlier in that same season or same tournament. I like this because it incentivizes doing well early in a season.
On the other hand, the NFL and NBA give better draft odds for to teams who did badly in the previous season. I also like this because it allows teams who don't have the (comparatively) massive resources of a team based in a large market to compete. This is NEGATIVE feedback, and of course fans of teams in large markets don't like it. Even so, negative feedback is the core of making a stable system.
To summarize, in a single season or in a single tournament, doing well is rewarded. Across seasons, some sports have mechanisms to help poor teams become better.
It is most likely because we are bad at pattern matching. By default we reward anything we perceive as positive, regardless of who we think is causing it or what the long-term consequences might be.
It takes some education to recognize the long-term effects of rewarding the wrong things, and then it takes even more education to not worry about the very long-term effects at all.
Is it fair if we get the objectively fastest swimmers to go slower so competition is closer?
Note that the advantaged swimmers in middle lanes are really objectively faster: they earn their spot through year long competitions and in-event qualifications. Sure, they will be an odd case or two.
Spectators don’t seem to mind it in rally race car driving, downhill skiing, bobsledding, and other timed events where multiple competitors cannot share the track.
Spectators also don’t seem to mind for diving, gymnastics, figure skating, equestrian and other events which are points defined and competitors are also performing sequentially.
All of those sports are far more niche than sports where the competitors compete directly against each other.
I can give you an example from my own sport: triathlon. It has two broad categories: short and long course. Short course is generally draft legal, and was developed specifically to get into the Olympics. Plenty of people can name the Brownlee brothers, Alex Yee (place Olympic athlete of your own home nation here). Most of my own damn triathlon club have no idea who Lucy Charles-Barclay is (the UK’s best long course triathlete and Ironman and 70.3 world champion)!
Your first list of sports are all single participant because of safety. Every one of those has a significant risk of injury or death that is unavoidable for the sport and nobody wants to die because the competitor next to you makes a mistake. Spectators would absolutely pay to watch it, however (see MMA, boxing, etc).
The second list are not judged by racing against the clock and therefore pointless to compete simultaneously.
> Your first list of sports are all single participant because of safety.
That’s irrelevant in terms of spectators. Which was the GPs point.
If the spectators can watch solo runs in X then they can watch it in Y.
> The second list are not judged by racing against the clock
I know, I said that already.
> and therefore pointless to compete simultaneously.
There are plenty of point-based competitions which are still competed simultaneously. Like Paralympic races. Darts. Shooting. Dancing competitions. I could list plenty more.
You’re conflating requirements with tradition.
———
The real crux of the matter isn’t any arbitrarily defined condition. It’s just what people are conditioned to expect.
Certain sports and even specific competitions within certain sports are structured a certain why because that’s how the organisers have decided. Yeah ticket sales will always be a factor in the decision making, but that doesn’t mean that one format is inherently incompatible with spectators than another format.
The real reason I think swimming is unlikely to ever be swam solo is for the same reasons Paralympic swimming races combine people with different disabilities: there just isn’t enough time in the calendar to fit every swimming event in if everyone swam solo. There are a multitude of different strokes and distances that get competed. It’s not like mountain biking where there’s only one way down the hill.
It's not just a tradition or conditioning out of nothing: it was also feasibility to do so. Eg. you don't get that gymnastics podium seven times over, you only get one. Whereas for bowling and darts, adding one extra spot is not that much extra space. You also completely ignored one reason GP brought up: safety (in rally driving). To save on time, they still usually start with a few minutes delay on the same track.
Where it is feasible to compare side-by-side, we do (swimming, running but not eg. discus throw or high jump), and we award medals on direct result. Where it isn't, we use other independently tracked scores (time, points...).
Rally driving is less to do with safety and more to do with the complexity of adding more cars. There are also plenty of motor racing sports where multiple vehicle are on the track at any one time. But those courses are wider. Why aren’t Rally tracks wider? Well there’s no reason they couldn’t be, but the sport was never intended to operate that way. Whereas other motor sports was intended to be head to head.
But that aside, you’re building a strawman argument here (eg I was never arguing against safety elements) doing so actually agreeing with the point I was making:
Spectators are not the only, or even in many cases, primary, reason that events are structured the way they are.
I agree there are a plethora of other reasons and made that point myself. Safety being just one of them. Feasibility being another. But a lot of the time these problems can be solved by one means or another if event organisers truly wanted ways to run their event differently.
You'd make that trade off? Do you swim competively or how many events do you watch per year?
I mean I'd make the tradeoff that there be no forward passes in the NFL but I'm not a follower of that sport so I'd likely not put that opinion out there because frankly I don't care.
If slower qualifiers got better position, then what you'd get would be qualifiers deliberately trying to sandbag themselves for that. Such an incentive is never a good look for sports.
The original comment is likely accurate regarding the benefit to ditectly trailing swimmers, but probably not trailing swimmers where shed vortices are stable in adjacent lanes where shed vortices interact chaotically.
Alright, so we're agreed: the only solution is to build every swim-racing pool of individual lanes with solid walls between each!8-)) All lanes are then equivalent.
Any turbulence created by waves and vortices smashing into hard surfaces is going to slow the swimmer down. To paraphrase an old adage, smooth is fast.
I'm inclined to concur with onlypassingthrough. If the resulting wake is similar to fish locomotion (e.g. thunniform or similar) vortices will shed off in a Karmen Vortex Street that spreads laterally with distance behind the swimmer (potentially into other lanes, and propulsive efficiency of propulsors are generally less efficient in turbulant vice laminar open-water flow... but not always, it can depend on the 'structure' [how chaotic] the flow is).
The magnitude of the energy in that turbulent wake will depend on how efficiently the oscillating fin interacts with water over time to produce forward thrust. The cool thing about oscillating foils as opposed to rotating thrusters, is that when the fin 'swoops' once it creates Vortex 'A' spinning clockwise, and when it 'swoops' back the result would be a Vortex 'B' spinning counterclockwise, and the two vortices will partially cancel out. That cancellation serves to recover energy from Vortex 'A' and the energy is transferred back into forward thrust.
In other words, fish tails create trails of contrarotating vortices and continually push off of them. It's like walking up a springy staircase, where each step you make, a little energy is recovered to bounce you up to the next step.
In theory, if you had a swimmer in front of you, generating a Karmen Vortex Street and not effectively canceling out those vortices, but instead just shedding vortices, you can use the energy from the swimmer in front of you to 'spring' yourself forward - barely using any energy yourself. Those complex hyrdodynamic relationships could be why some swimmers/flyers tend to fly in specific formations with other animals in their school/flock.
Bottom line, I would bet that any residual vortices that spread into adjacent swimming lanes will tend to interact chaotically and result in unstructured turbulance, which should yield less optimal swimming conditions for swimmers in those lanes.
> you can use the energy from the swimmer in front of you to 'spring' yourself forward
When I swam competitively in the early 1980s, we did this during workouts; we'd all swim in a line with very close spacing, and switch off who was in front after every lap (two lengths--this was in a 25 meter pool). Being in front you could feel the extra work you were doing.
>you can use the energy from the swimmer in front of you to 'spring' yourself forward
This bears out in the real world. Much like a peloton in cycling, swimming directly behind another swimmer can be far more energy efficient than swimming by yourself and feel like you are getting pulled along for the ride.
Even swimming slightly offset another swimmer saves significant energy. It also reduces the chance of getting kicked in the face. We do this when possible during triathlon open water swims.
You can't reward failure in competition. You will get people purposely going slower to get the middle lanes. What they could swim in a pool in which they aren't using the outer lanes, so bigger pools, or less swimmers.
I thought the comparison to running was interesting. As an almost exclusively terrestrial mammal, there is a very natural way for us to run. No one is going to discover than running on our arms and legs is faster, or something other than ”unnatural” way of running is faster.
But that’s not really the case with swimming. We didn’t evolve a natural swimming instinct or form for speed.
When I learned that (nearly?) all terrestrial mammals can swim to some degree (even ones that look like they shouldn’t be able to - like ungulates), I was a bit surprised, but it’s not too surprising upon reflection. But that got me thinking then: what is the best terrestrial mammalian body plan that also happens to be good for swimming? What terrestrial mammal would also be fast swimmers if they could learn and train for it as humans do? Maybe my thinking is clouded by anthrocentrism, but the human body plan which is good for bipedal running also seems to work out pretty well for swimming.
Of course, top human swimming speeds are pretty terrible compared to human running speeds and the swimming speed of basically any other aquatic animal, but we’re not made for it!
A few years ago I tried out TikTok and quickly came to see that there are huge niches inside the platform that are barely even searchable or existent outside the app. One of which was these videos of people sprinting or galloping on all fours. It's fascinating and terrifying seeing people who've practiced do the movements, it's uncanny in both how natural and unnatural it can look. It seems to be an intersection of unconventional exercise enthusiasts and furry-types.
Very cool! Reminds me of Tim Burton's "Planet of the Apes" (2001), which did quadrupedal running with practical effects — harnesses, towed treadmills, all sorts of tricks — i.e., cheating, from the POV of this thread. :)
I just went down a small rabbit hole, watching some videos of quadrupedal running, and what struck me was how un-balanced the motion looked. Even the guy who is (one of) the world's fastest has this weird twist in his back while he is doing it, to make sure his knees and elbows don't smack together. That may be sustainable when you are young and strong, but I worry this guy, or anyone else who gets into this, is going to be wracked with long-term damage and in a lot of pain when older.
Ryuta Kinugasa, Yoshiyuki Usami. "How Fast Can a Human Run? Bipedal vs. Quadrupedal Running." Frontiers of Bioengineering and Biotechnology 4:56 (June 2016).
That looks remarkably like an April Fool's article released at the wrong time of year. The second-to-last paragraph is where they reveal the joke to anyone who wasn't already in on it:
> This study has limitations. Although statistical models are significantly related to mathematical formula [sic], the use of a statistical model to accurately predict future athletic performance is challenging (Hilbe, 2008). Fitted linear models should be treated with some caution. The use of linear regression for world record modeling would yield a continued decline that would eventually become negative, thus suggesting that update of world records can be continued until 0 s. It must also be noted that quadrupedal world records did not exist before 2008. This relatively recent involvement [sic] of quadrupedal running results in a somewhat tenuous comparison of world record times. Therefore, despite a high coefficient of determination, a large diverging confidence interval was found.—
—and then right back into it—
> —The 95% confidence intervals [sic] indicates that projected intersects could occur as early as in 2032 (9.238 s) or as late as 2076 (9.341 s).
A "rebuttal paper" might accept their major premise (i.e. feasibility of "a statistical model to accurately predict future athletic performance") but argue that rather than fitting a straight line (linear regression), we should fit an exponential decay curve (exponential regression). In an appendix, we'd try fitting a hyperbola (y = K1/(x-X0) + K2), taking X0 for quadrupedal running at 2008 and X0 for bipedal running anywhere from 2 million to 10 million years ago.
In an alternative "experimentalist approach," the rebuttal paper's author would actually run 100m himself, first on two legs and then on four; plot these as an additional data point (with x=2025) in each set; and fit a polynomial to that data. This would likely change the conclusion quite drastically. ;)
Bears, particularly polar bears, are terrestrial mammals with impressive swimming capabilities - they can swim up to 60 miles without rest and use a modified dog paddle that's remarkably efficient.
This is a stretch for what you might consider terrestrial, but polar bears swim faster than olympic athletes. Moose also swim hella fast, so funnily enough it's the same guys in water as on land that you have to look out for.
I had no idea how enormous moose were until I had to go to Fairbanks a few years ago for a work thing. It was unreal sitting in line waiting to move through the gate at the air base and seeing a moose casually running down along the 8 foot fence along the perimeter and realizing it was taller than the fence!
Hippos famously cannot swim, despite spending lots of time in water. They're too dense to float. There used to be a BBC filler video in the UK that featured an animation of hippos swimming from below. It was pure fantasy. In reality they hop along the bottom.
Beavers, with their wide flat tails, are very good swimmers. Looking it up though it seems black bears are the fastest overall although I believe beavers are the fastest relative to their body size.
That doesn’t surprise me though, considering our ancestors and almost all of our closest relatives are arboreal. We are descended from climbers. Our lack of climbing ability relative to other primates makes us the odd ones out.
Strange comment. Strange because at the high end, I very much doubt that any non-human ape will ever get close to Adam Ondra's ascent of "Silence" (9c). On the other hand, the average human is very much less able to climb trees and other topologically similar objects than most apes. So I am not sure that it really makes sense to talk about "our lack of climbing ability" - in humans, it is unevenly exercised and thus shows huge range, but the best humans can climb in ways that I doubt most or any other apes could.
Chrome's marketing budget is nearly as large as Mozilla's entire budget. They spent a couple of years actively targeting Firefox users with Chrome ads on the frontpage of google.com, and got Adobe Flash and Java and most of the free antivirus solutions to auto-install Chrome and make it the default browser.
I have yet to hear anyone on HN present an argument for how Mozilla could effectively counter that onslaught. Certainly not without using methods that they would also have complained about. (Though nobody seems to hold Chrome's bloatware tactics against them for some reason).
Not realy. It is pretty common to compare the average ability when we are comparing between species. For example when we say cheetahs can run at X m/s we don’t talk about the speed of the fastest cheetah who won the cheetah olympics. They just measured a few and we use that as a basis.
> I very much doubt that any non-human ape will ever get close to Adam Ondra's ascent of "Silence" (9c).
I don’t know what you base this on. Is this just a hunch? Are we talking here about the chances of a monkey randomly catching a fancy for that cliff? Because i agree that is unlikely to happen. But with a sufficintly trained and motivated one I wouldn’t be so sure.
I must be way above the median age here if I'm the first to mention how much this looks like what when I was a teenager we called the "Man from Atlantis" stroke. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_from_Atlantis
I think the rule was created because underwater racing is not that interesting to watch for spectators and more difficult to officiate from the surface. Maybe all we need is a bunch of GoPros stuck around the pool and we can see a new race category?
A swim coach told me that in 1950s people used to do the first lap of breaststroke underwater but people kept passing out. It wasn't safe for youth sports.
The real reason is safety. People have known about the efficiency of swimming under water for the longest time, but competitors would pass out or even die when they held their breath too long. So the rules changed to force people to the surface.
There is a sport called finswimming which has underwater speed disciplines (apnea or with bottles). But as the name implies it comes with the use of fins.
Additionally consider (as was pointed by
swarnie in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44542285 ) that there exist clothing restrictions in Olympic swimming - in my opinion this is also a contradiction to the spirit of "freestyle".
The usual argument against clothing restrictions (see also supershoes in running and various aero stuff in cycling) is that you want the sport to reward the best athletes rather than turning into a technological arms race. This is especially complicated in sports where people don't get to choose their own gear and so (for instance), whether you have access to the best shoes depends on who your sponsor is. Back when Nike was first rolling out the first supershoes, you would sometimes see athletes sponsored by other brands actually wear Nikes with the logo blacked out, because it was just such a big advantage.
As another comparison point, look at Formula 1, where technology is a huge part of the competition, with the result that a driver can be dominant one year and then fall way back the next because of some technological shift. Of course, even F1 does tinker with the rules a lot to try to preserve competition, as when they banned electronic stabilization.
F1 is a weird one. Technology can make a massive difference. I remember the 1970s when a car with a skirt destroyed the opposition by sticking to the ground and the six wheeled beasties and the other wacky stuff.
Sponsored by fags (obviously)
F1 is all about the drivers except it is also all about the marques (who pay quite a lot for it and need to show a return).
The rule book for F1 is pretty daunting these days and I'm not too sure how much is driver and how much is car these days. I do know that F1 drivers do abuse themselves badly during a race - they experience G forces that would make you and I weep and probably pass out.
> there exist clothing restrictions in Olympic swimming
My argument against this is that there are already so many activities where less wealthy are priced out. Most prospective athletes (or families) don't have a bunch of money to shell out for stuff like hydrophobic full-body suits, or hockey gear, or whatever.
20 years ago when I was learning to swim by myself (spoiler: i still do not swim) I had the intuition that a movement like this would work. I actually
felt it in muscles, not sure how to better explain it. Very similar to preparing for a climbing route. But after a couple of complete failures I gave up.
Personally I think finswimming is the way to make up for humans being land animals. Fins can extend the range I can swim at least 20x to what I can do without them.
IIRC, the backstroke races at the 1996 Olympics were pushing the boundaries of human potential as competitors swam some or all of the races underwater. The optics of an underwater race were not good (ha!). As a result, FINA made it mandatory to surface and compete in actual backstroke instead of underwater dolphin kick.
the backstroke rule change was circa 1988. They changed butterfly (and I suppose freestyle) after the 96 Olympics when Dennis Pankratov won both butterflies with this technique. Interestingly, the backstroke innovator who probably triggered the earlier rule change got beat in the final by someone not using it (Berkhoff in 88, silver)
The latest rule change in this area was banning dolphin kicks on your back on the breast-to-free exchange in IM. Ryan Lochte triggered that one.
"That all changed in 1998, when FINA, the world governing body of competitive swimming, ruled that swimmers performing the backstroke had to surface after 15 meters."
... which aligns with my recollection of the '96 Olympics and being gobsmacked at how long the swimmers were holding their breath.
They would swim the entire 50m underwater, if given the chance. I've seen them do so in practice, very lazy-looking dolphin kicks, but still faster than most swimmers on the surface.
I was thinking of optimized movement patterns to increase efficiency / reduce wasted energy. This numberphile video explains how fish and other swimming animals barely lose any energy, even though they create vortices, because the vortices are in turn used to propel the fish forward.
growing your body optimized for swimming. The training is one thing. I mean shaping your body into the hydrodynamically optimized form, like say growing some muscles (or fat - shaping yourself into a more dolhpin like shape :) here and there mostly for the purpose of better resulting hydrodynamic shape. With the medicine advances it may start earlier in life and be non-catchable by the sports authorities.
And, if you look at one of the Chinese Olympic winners last year - the wave in front of him was significantly smaller than in front of anybody else. Have no idea how he achieved that though.
Dumb q, never learned to swim and don't understand the sport contextually.
Given:
"Some especially strong underwater swimmers stayed submerged almost the entire length of the pool, since there was no rule against it. That all changed in 1998, when FINA, the world governing body of competitive swimming, ruled that swimmers performing the backstroke had to surface after 15 meters."
This is used to explain a conclusion used throughout the rest of the article, namely, the dolphin/fish strokes aren't useful in competitive swimming because people using them have to surface.
But I don't understand: the rule says swimmers performing the backstroke have to surface, and when I look up backstroke, it is someone laying on their back? Which doesn't sound like either of these
> the rule says swimmers performing the backstroke have to surface, and when I look up backstroke, it is someone laying on their back? Which doesn't sound like either of these
The updated rules essentially say a swimmer in a "backstroke race" must perform the backstroke for 35 meters. Prior to this rule, top swimmers would stay underwater for most of a length and only do a few actual back strokes before their flip turn.
In other words, before this rule they mostly were not performing the backstroke, despite the name of the race.
Ahhhh, after reading this, I think the part I was missing is swimming events aren't general w/r/t method
i.e. I'm familiar with track and field - it's "transport yourself X distance, fastest time wins"
With swimming, its "transport yourself X distance using method Y"
And you could have used the methods described in a race where method Y == backstroke at some point, as the requirements for backstroke were such that you just did a couple things quick, then could go underwater and do your thing till you finish...but that workaround is no longer available given the 15m rule.
Underwater dolphin kicks can be done on your front, back, or (I guess) side, so it also works for backstroke. And the way that starts and turns work in backstroke still puts you underwater at the start of each lap.
There was a brief period where the fastest backstrokers in the world would swim almost the entire length of the pool underwater using the upside down dolphin kick because it is faster than swimming on the surface for the reasons described in the article.
I get that it's a quirk of the sport's history, but it's funny and dumb that swimming awards medals and records for being the fastest at a slower stroke. It's like if track meets would have a 100m sprint, a 100m skip, and a 100m run-backwards.
If I could change things in the world, I wouldn't eliminate the extraneous strokes in swimming, but I would include additional competitions in all the track distances: backwards running, handstand walk, and one-legged hopping.
Olympics have different 'strokes' used between sprint, middle distance, long distance, hurdles, steeplechase and walking races - so there is some variety in the locomotion forms unlike your strawman.
The walking race is the only one where there are specific rules. The other races just happen to mostly favor a style. Sprint finishes in long distance races are common and legal
Oh, I didn't realize there were 100m, 200m, 400m, 800m, 1500m, etc walking races.
Is the variety in locomotion in the races you listed regulated by the governing body? Like, would you be DQ'd if you skipped the last 50m of a 100m dash?
For the record, I would fully endorse a "hurdles" equivalent in swimming: put an obstacle every 10m that the swimmers have to go under. Make the lanes zig-zag.
There's at least a couple of different runs, relay and hurdles are examples of variations on pure running. And if you squint, ice skating in a lot of ways is just a different style of running (with blades on the feet). Though you might then argue that rowing is a type of swimming with oars and a boat :)
The jumping events do have different "strokes": long jump, (standing) broad jump, triple jump, possibly-etc. As far as I know, there is no generalized "transport yourself X distance without touching the ground" event. (Although I could be wrong.)
It is annoying that rules were added to the “freestyle” race, to preclude these new better underwater forms of swimming. Freestyle ought to mean you are free to pick any style.
Each of the major strokes has a distinct functional example: front crawl is fastest, breaststroke lets you sight directly in front of you with each breath (which is useful in general open water), and backstroke allows you to breath uninterrupted.
It makes sense to me to have different stroke events, although I wish there was a true freestyle that allowed for anything, including underwater.
My daughter’s school had a race day to wrap up their swimming lessons, and one of the events involved rolling from front to back every second stroke. It was funny to watch but not very practical.
Seeing backwards running races would be impressive. Seeing the fastest human runners is also very impressive, but it’s also less interesting in a sense because they’re doing exactly what our bodies evolved to be able to do. It is interesting to see that ability pushed to its natural limits, but I think it’s a bit more interesting to see people excel in things we didn’t evolve to do: like swimming or running backwards.
"Because the system does not have separate gears, but one (continuously shifting) gear and a separate 'reverse mode' (as opposed to reverse gear), the transmission works in reverse as well, giving it the side effect that one can drive backwards as fast as forwards. As a result, in the former Dutch annual backward driving world championship, the DAFs had to be put in a separate competition because no other car could keep up."
> I get that it's a quirk of the sport's history, but it's funny and dumb that swimming awards medals and records for being the fastest at a slower stroke. It's like if track meets would have a 100m sprint, a 100m skip, and a 100m run-backwards.
This is arguably what race walking is, though it's over longer distances.
i'd guess it is faster than the physically the same, just 90 degree rotated, dolphin kick only because of the proximity to the surface - in the dolphin kick significant energy gets wasted as the surface wave (i.e. instead of pushing yourself from the large mass of water, you push the smaller amount of water above you into a surface wave, the same reason you want your boat prop to be as deep as possible). My bet would be that the fish and dolphin kicks would give the same performance if both performed at sufficient depth, like 5-10 meters.
Hmm, divers have known the dolphin kick for years (decades?) as a way to move underwater at speed, but you’re rarely near the surface or the bottom to have effects from the surface interfaces. Interesting.
Amazing! This is about the dolphin kick performed on its side, rechristened “the fish kick.” I couldn’t fathom (ha) why the same kick rotated 90 degrees could be faster but it turns out that the kicking motion is constrained by the motion of the water around it. In the dolphin kick, the water moves up and down and is limited by the water’s surface and pool’s bottom. The swimmer frees themself of these constraints by turning on their side.
Does that give advantage to those in the middle lanes?
Middle lanes are faster, and for some reason swimmer with the fastest record gets the middle in most events, which always seemed weird to me -- it's a positive feedback system. Seems like you should give the advantage to the people who are behind, not ahead... but that's common in sports and in modern society for some reason.
Giving advantages to the better participants is a practice common across a variety of racing sports. The idea being that, if you could earn an advantage by doing worse, then in a race where you know at a certain point that you can't medal anyway, it would be optimal to just intentionally slow down to try to come in last and secure an advantage in the next race.
I've heard this said before, and I understand the reasoning, but I don't think it's good enough. We should be aiming for equality at the start of a race, not giving the better people a head start. If qualifying races are broken in the way, then just randomize the starting order. Literally do a random draw as people are walking/driving up to the start. It would make the events far more interesting as well.
As a counterpoint, think about the balancing act of trying to place as well as you can in the semifinals while not over-exhausting yourself to the point where you've got no energy left for the final.
I think this dynamic is way more interesting than what you'd get if semifinal rankings had no impact ; that latter scenario would basically result in a Dutch auction on effort, and likely suppress performance on the qualifying races.
Let’s consider auto sport. For most races, there are fixed starting positions that are determined by qualifying. Qualification is generally done by racing around the track as fast as you can without any other racer on the track or blocking you. The faster you qualify, the better your starting position. The better your starting position, the more advantage you have in the main race. If you are trying to figure out who the better racer is, it’s not a bad system. Everyone is incentivized to do as well as they can at each step.
But, I think there is another motivation to consider. I don’t think the point is necessarily to find the best racer (or swimmer in your case). Instead, I think the point may be to make it so that the best swimmers can swim their best race. The goal isn’t just to see who can win, but to see if the winners can beat a larger record. You want the best racers to have the best chance at performing their best. When the best swimmers are in the middle lanes, they have the best conditions for breaking other records.
It’s not the most fair system. Track is probably a little better, but even then, the lane you are in has certain advantages and disadvantages.
You could make it based on past performance at a given level. So your position in a qualifying race depends on your placement in last year's qualifying race. Your position at the final Olympic event depends on your placement at the same event in the last Olympics.
If it's your first time at a given event, I guess keep whatever we do now or make it random. The reason for this system would be to make surprise wins from less-known people more likely, which I'd think would be desirable.
It’s not strange at all. People want to see records broken. Levelling the playing field works against that goal.
Sports is an aspirational medium of entertainment. People want to see excellence. They want to see dynasties. Too much fairness and balance leads to loss of interest.
Look at the NBA. We’re in a period of unprecedented parity and balance. It seems like every year brings a different championship team. Ratings are way down and loads of people are complaining about the CBA which was written with the goal of bringing more parity to the league, a goal it’s quite obviously achieving!
> People want to see records broken.
Not always. Some of the most prestigious horse races in the UK, US, and Australia ar handicap races. The horse that is most successful carries the most weight. The handicapper attempts to create a dead heat.
On the other hand the NFL’s hard salary cap and consequent parity is what has made it the most popular US professional sporting league. People in the US don’t want to see big markets buy their way to championships.
as an adult the NFL is the most watchable professional sport for me, despite my city having no NFL team. every year I can just choose a playoff bound team to root for based on their style or storyline. And each game is meaningful whereas the other professional sports have regular seasons that just drag on and on. also love the one and done knockout playoff format.
I know that's the narrative about the NBA lately but it's just that - narrative.
It's far from proven that the short-lived "parity" that has emerged in the aftermath of the KD Warriors dynasty is the cause of down ratings.
I do personally dislike it though and find the parity via CBA to be artificial. It just causes continuity on a contender to be untenable.
And continuity is what makes for good basketball, hence why dynasties are so fun to watch. It's not just that they win, a lot. It's that they have a consistent style of play with a consistent cast of players (stars and role players) that fans get to know over the course of those dynastic years.
It also focuses the race around the center of the pool which works from a visual standpoint. Favorites in the middle, dark horses surrounding at the edge
It's strange to reward slower contestants in sports.
IIRC Ecclestone suggested getting rid of qualifiers and just putting the F1 cars n the inverse order of their last race. This idea was in order to get more overtakes (the best parts of F1 races). I think it would be great.
There was a period in World Rally Championship history when the top drivers would manipulate the starting order for the following day's stages by intentionally slowing down before the end of the stage. It was bizarre to watch teams intentionally give up 10+ second margins when stage wins can come down to half-second gaps.
In the BTCC, there was a similar situation for a while: in one of the races, the best-perfoming half of the pack would start at the back of the grid, and the worst-performing half at the front of the grid - but in-order within the two groups. However, since 2006 there has been some randomness added to the grid positioning, which makes attempting to manipulate it a risky business.
In F1 they also introduced DRS in 2011 to get more overtakes
Makes sense. More interest in F1. More money for Bernie.
1. Ecclestone has been out of the sport for nearly a decade.
2. A race weekend is a three-day affair, with tickets sold for each day. What do you do on Saturday if there are no qualifs?
> What do you do on Saturday if there are no qualifs?
Can you imagine Monaco with no quali >_<
F1 is dead boring anyway, you're more there for the ambience and the VIP lounges and whatnot.
Three races per weekend?
Just thinking if it's done F1 style it is fair. It's fresh at each competition.
If it's based on past times that creates possibly a feedback loop but depends on details. E.g. can a swimmer use a non competition record towards their qualification.
Not that strange. Handicaps are quite common.
yeah, otherwise good ppl will do bad in qualifiers to get good position...
Reminds me of the final boss in Smash Bros. If you purposefully let him whip you at first, the adaptive play would nerf him enough to let you easily finish him.
Works for Mario Kart
Track & Field races stagger the starting positions, to compensate for the outer lanes of the track being longer. American football has the teams switch goals every quarter, to even out the advantages of having the wind at your team's back.
Why should swimming be different?
NFL playoffs give home field advantage to the teams with the better regular season records.
Your examples are about making circumstances equivalent, thus canceling out any advantage. There's no way to e.g. switch lanes in swimming so we're bound to have some contestants advantaged.
In cases where some contestants have to be advantaged, the conventional solution in sports is to advantage the ones who performed better according to some metric.
I think it's unfair to reward those who were lucky or already advantaged somehow, but my wife who has a background in track and field thinks anything else would be unfair.
I believe the main reasoning why this is fair is that this advantage is earned.
Would it be fairer to use randomly assigned lane? Then you get almost equal competitors in advantageous and disadvantageous lanes?
Isn't the top result in a year also used for qualification purposes (and thus lane assignment) for top-level competitions? Basically, you earn a spot in the best lane throughout the calendar year.
When I hear of an advantage being earned, I imagine it would go to the one who has put in the most effort, or been most inventive. Here, it goes to the one with the best metric. Metrics are a proxy for effort/inventiveness, but far from perfect. (As any software developer in a large organisation can attest.)
> ... no way to e.g. switch lanes in swimming so ...
Why couldn't you shorten the pool, from a swimmer's PoV, by putting (say) a very shallow plywood box against the wall of the pool at one end of each "non-center" lane? Yes, you might need to do some math & stats to figure out just how shallow a box. Or, you could use a feedback loop - boxes start very shallow, leading swimmers get to pick a lane, boxes adjusted, repeat.
if there is an advantage to a lane in swimming can't we add a certain small amount of time to compensate
It's very difficult to quantify the advantages of the middle lanes: it strongly depends on the style, swimmers, and pool.
How about separate pools for each lane?
Smaller pools are slower.
In US sports it is very common in the tournament for a single season, or in a single event to reward better performance earlier in that same season or same tournament. I like this because it incentivizes doing well early in a season.
On the other hand, the NFL and NBA give better draft odds for to teams who did badly in the previous season. I also like this because it allows teams who don't have the (comparatively) massive resources of a team based in a large market to compete. This is NEGATIVE feedback, and of course fans of teams in large markets don't like it. Even so, negative feedback is the core of making a stable system.
To summarize, in a single season or in a single tournament, doing well is rewarded. Across seasons, some sports have mechanisms to help poor teams become better.
> for some reason
It is most likely because we are bad at pattern matching. By default we reward anything we perceive as positive, regardless of who we think is causing it or what the long-term consequences might be.
It takes some education to recognize the long-term effects of rewarding the wrong things, and then it takes even more education to not worry about the very long-term effects at all.
It seems like the objectively fair solution is that everyone swims the exact same lane in a still pool and is timed.
Or more simply (and with fewer alterations to how swimming competitions work today), just have a couple of unused lanes on the outside of the pool.
This already happens in SCM and SCY competitions as many short course pools are just the short side of a long course pool.
To avoid turbulence, you'd have to skip lanes (or make them very wide) and allow enough space between the pool side walls and outermost lanes, right?
this is what is done in most major competitions already
Seeing the other competitors right next to you is often a factor in how hard one pushes themselves in a race, no matter the species.
Fewer records, fairer competition. I'd make that tradeoff
Is it fair if we get the objectively fastest swimmers to go slower so competition is closer?
Note that the advantaged swimmers in middle lanes are really objectively faster: they earn their spot through year long competitions and in-event qualifications. Sure, they will be an odd case or two.
See https://www.quora.com/How-are-the-lane-assignments-chosen-in...
But spectators won’t, and we are what fund sport, ultimately.
Spectators don’t seem to mind it in rally race car driving, downhill skiing, bobsledding, and other timed events where multiple competitors cannot share the track.
Spectators also don’t seem to mind for diving, gymnastics, figure skating, equestrian and other events which are points defined and competitors are also performing sequentially.
All of those sports are far more niche than sports where the competitors compete directly against each other.
I can give you an example from my own sport: triathlon. It has two broad categories: short and long course. Short course is generally draft legal, and was developed specifically to get into the Olympics. Plenty of people can name the Brownlee brothers, Alex Yee (place Olympic athlete of your own home nation here). Most of my own damn triathlon club have no idea who Lucy Charles-Barclay is (the UK’s best long course triathlete and Ironman and 70.3 world champion)!
> All of those sports are far more niche than sports where the competitors compete directly against each other.
They might not be your field of expertise but calling (for example) Rally as “niche” is insanely off the mark.
> I can give you an example
Except you didn’t give an example that had anything to do with our conversation.
Well done on the triathlon though. It’s a very tough sport to get any good at.
I tried a few times but hated the running part haha
Your first list of sports are all single participant because of safety. Every one of those has a significant risk of injury or death that is unavoidable for the sport and nobody wants to die because the competitor next to you makes a mistake. Spectators would absolutely pay to watch it, however (see MMA, boxing, etc).
The second list are not judged by racing against the clock and therefore pointless to compete simultaneously.
> Your first list of sports are all single participant because of safety.
That’s irrelevant in terms of spectators. Which was the GPs point.
If the spectators can watch solo runs in X then they can watch it in Y.
> The second list are not judged by racing against the clock
I know, I said that already.
> and therefore pointless to compete simultaneously.
There are plenty of point-based competitions which are still competed simultaneously. Like Paralympic races. Darts. Shooting. Dancing competitions. I could list plenty more.
You’re conflating requirements with tradition.
———
The real crux of the matter isn’t any arbitrarily defined condition. It’s just what people are conditioned to expect.
Certain sports and even specific competitions within certain sports are structured a certain why because that’s how the organisers have decided. Yeah ticket sales will always be a factor in the decision making, but that doesn’t mean that one format is inherently incompatible with spectators than another format.
The real reason I think swimming is unlikely to ever be swam solo is for the same reasons Paralympic swimming races combine people with different disabilities: there just isn’t enough time in the calendar to fit every swimming event in if everyone swam solo. There are a multitude of different strokes and distances that get competed. It’s not like mountain biking where there’s only one way down the hill.
That's not true.
It's not just a tradition or conditioning out of nothing: it was also feasibility to do so. Eg. you don't get that gymnastics podium seven times over, you only get one. Whereas for bowling and darts, adding one extra spot is not that much extra space. You also completely ignored one reason GP brought up: safety (in rally driving). To save on time, they still usually start with a few minutes delay on the same track.
Where it is feasible to compare side-by-side, we do (swimming, running but not eg. discus throw or high jump), and we award medals on direct result. Where it isn't, we use other independently tracked scores (time, points...).
Rally driving is less to do with safety and more to do with the complexity of adding more cars. There are also plenty of motor racing sports where multiple vehicle are on the track at any one time. But those courses are wider. Why aren’t Rally tracks wider? Well there’s no reason they couldn’t be, but the sport was never intended to operate that way. Whereas other motor sports was intended to be head to head.
But that aside, you’re building a strawman argument here (eg I was never arguing against safety elements) doing so actually agreeing with the point I was making:
Spectators are not the only, or even in many cases, primary, reason that events are structured the way they are.
I agree there are a plethora of other reasons and made that point myself. Safety being just one of them. Feasibility being another. But a lot of the time these problems can be solved by one means or another if event organisers truly wanted ways to run their event differently.
You'd make that trade off? Do you swim competively or how many events do you watch per year?
I mean I'd make the tradeoff that there be no forward passes in the NFL but I'm not a follower of that sport so I'd likely not put that opinion out there because frankly I don't care.
Or a cylindrical geometry, so there is symmetry between lanes.
I vote in favor of this idea and will even contribute $5 towards building the necessary O'Neill cylinder.
Now we only need to get Elon on board to fund the rest.
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If slower qualifiers got better position, then what you'd get would be qualifiers deliberately trying to sandbag themselves for that. Such an incentive is never a good look for sports.
Traditionally the middle lanes have less turbulence so the faster swimmers get them so they can swim faster, whereas us slowpokes get the side lanes.
And I guess it looks good on TV to have those nice chevrons
I want to see world records get broken
> Seems like you should give the advantage to the people who are behind, not ahead...
Lol? How did you work that one out?
By extension, should the olympics be comprised entirely of each country's worst athletes?
The original comment is likely accurate regarding the benefit to ditectly trailing swimmers, but probably not trailing swimmers where shed vortices are stable in adjacent lanes where shed vortices interact chaotically.
Alright, so we're agreed: the only solution is to build every swim-racing pool of individual lanes with solid walls between each!8-)) All lanes are then equivalent.
And if someone in lane 7 speeds ahead, they are likely not seeing any of the turbulence from other swimmers either
“To him who has much, even more will be given. To him who has little, even what he has will be taken away”
Any turbulence created by waves and vortices smashing into hard surfaces is going to slow the swimmer down. To paraphrase an old adage, smooth is fast.
I'm inclined to concur with onlypassingthrough. If the resulting wake is similar to fish locomotion (e.g. thunniform or similar) vortices will shed off in a Karmen Vortex Street that spreads laterally with distance behind the swimmer (potentially into other lanes, and propulsive efficiency of propulsors are generally less efficient in turbulant vice laminar open-water flow... but not always, it can depend on the 'structure' [how chaotic] the flow is).
The magnitude of the energy in that turbulent wake will depend on how efficiently the oscillating fin interacts with water over time to produce forward thrust. The cool thing about oscillating foils as opposed to rotating thrusters, is that when the fin 'swoops' once it creates Vortex 'A' spinning clockwise, and when it 'swoops' back the result would be a Vortex 'B' spinning counterclockwise, and the two vortices will partially cancel out. That cancellation serves to recover energy from Vortex 'A' and the energy is transferred back into forward thrust.
In other words, fish tails create trails of contrarotating vortices and continually push off of them. It's like walking up a springy staircase, where each step you make, a little energy is recovered to bounce you up to the next step.
In theory, if you had a swimmer in front of you, generating a Karmen Vortex Street and not effectively canceling out those vortices, but instead just shedding vortices, you can use the energy from the swimmer in front of you to 'spring' yourself forward - barely using any energy yourself. Those complex hyrdodynamic relationships could be why some swimmers/flyers tend to fly in specific formations with other animals in their school/flock.
Bottom line, I would bet that any residual vortices that spread into adjacent swimming lanes will tend to interact chaotically and result in unstructured turbulance, which should yield less optimal swimming conditions for swimmers in those lanes.
> you can use the energy from the swimmer in front of you to 'spring' yourself forward
When I swam competitively in the early 1980s, we did this during workouts; we'd all swim in a line with very close spacing, and switch off who was in front after every lap (two lengths--this was in a 25 meter pool). Being in front you could feel the extra work you were doing.
>you can use the energy from the swimmer in front of you to 'spring' yourself forward
This bears out in the real world. Much like a peloton in cycling, swimming directly behind another swimmer can be far more energy efficient than swimming by yourself and feel like you are getting pulled along for the ride.
Even swimming slightly offset another swimmer saves significant energy. It also reduces the chance of getting kicked in the face. We do this when possible during triathlon open water swims.
Indeed, and as a consequence there are rules for who gets which lane.
You can't reward failure in competition. You will get people purposely going slower to get the middle lanes. What they could swim in a pool in which they aren't using the outer lanes, so bigger pools, or less swimmers.
They should just make the pool wider with a big unused area on either side.
the rescue/combat side stroke is very efficient too, and that's due to the very large kick you can use since you are sideways
I thought the comparison to running was interesting. As an almost exclusively terrestrial mammal, there is a very natural way for us to run. No one is going to discover than running on our arms and legs is faster, or something other than ”unnatural” way of running is faster.
But that’s not really the case with swimming. We didn’t evolve a natural swimming instinct or form for speed.
When I learned that (nearly?) all terrestrial mammals can swim to some degree (even ones that look like they shouldn’t be able to - like ungulates), I was a bit surprised, but it’s not too surprising upon reflection. But that got me thinking then: what is the best terrestrial mammalian body plan that also happens to be good for swimming? What terrestrial mammal would also be fast swimmers if they could learn and train for it as humans do? Maybe my thinking is clouded by anthrocentrism, but the human body plan which is good for bipedal running also seems to work out pretty well for swimming.
Of course, top human swimming speeds are pretty terrible compared to human running speeds and the swimming speed of basically any other aquatic animal, but we’re not made for it!
>No one is going to discover than running on our arms and legs is faster, or something other than ”unnatural” way of running is faster.
Surprisingly not everyone seems to be convinced of that
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4928019/
A few years ago I tried out TikTok and quickly came to see that there are huge niches inside the platform that are barely even searchable or existent outside the app. One of which was these videos of people sprinting or galloping on all fours. It's fascinating and terrifying seeing people who've practiced do the movements, it's uncanny in both how natural and unnatural it can look. It seems to be an intersection of unconventional exercise enthusiasts and furry-types.
Sprinting: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6S0ctkOixj8
Galloping / jumping: https://old.reddit.com/r/toptalent/comments/ldxsoz/these_peo...
Very cool! Reminds me of Tim Burton's "Planet of the Apes" (2001), which did quadrupedal running with practical effects — harnesses, towed treadmills, all sorts of tricks — i.e., cheating, from the POV of this thread. :)
"Behind the Scenes of Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KighzjHkZtY&t=803s "Ape School" starts at 9m35s. Quadrupedal running starts at 13m23s.
Holy shit, quadrupedal running is my new favorite skill.
I just went down a small rabbit hole, watching some videos of quadrupedal running, and what struck me was how un-balanced the motion looked. Even the guy who is (one of) the world's fastest has this weird twist in his back while he is doing it, to make sure his knees and elbows don't smack together. That may be sustainable when you are young and strong, but I worry this guy, or anyone else who gets into this, is going to be wracked with long-term damage and in a lot of pain when older.
It's okay if the best motion is not symmetric. The swimming in TFA isn't symmetric either.
Ryuta Kinugasa, Yoshiyuki Usami. "How Fast Can a Human Run? Bipedal vs. Quadrupedal Running." Frontiers of Bioengineering and Biotechnology 4:56 (June 2016).
That looks remarkably like an April Fool's article released at the wrong time of year. The second-to-last paragraph is where they reveal the joke to anyone who wasn't already in on it:
> This study has limitations. Although statistical models are significantly related to mathematical formula [sic], the use of a statistical model to accurately predict future athletic performance is challenging (Hilbe, 2008). Fitted linear models should be treated with some caution. The use of linear regression for world record modeling would yield a continued decline that would eventually become negative, thus suggesting that update of world records can be continued until 0 s. It must also be noted that quadrupedal world records did not exist before 2008. This relatively recent involvement [sic] of quadrupedal running results in a somewhat tenuous comparison of world record times. Therefore, despite a high coefficient of determination, a large diverging confidence interval was found.—
—and then right back into it—
> —The 95% confidence intervals [sic] indicates that projected intersects could occur as early as in 2032 (9.238 s) or as late as 2076 (9.341 s).
A "rebuttal paper" might accept their major premise (i.e. feasibility of "a statistical model to accurately predict future athletic performance") but argue that rather than fitting a straight line (linear regression), we should fit an exponential decay curve (exponential regression). In an appendix, we'd try fitting a hyperbola (y = K1/(x-X0) + K2), taking X0 for quadrupedal running at 2008 and X0 for bipedal running anywhere from 2 million to 10 million years ago.
In an alternative "experimentalist approach," the rebuttal paper's author would actually run 100m himself, first on two legs and then on four; plot these as an additional data point (with x=2025) in each set; and fit a polynomial to that data. This would likely change the conclusion quite drastically. ;)
I’m going to wait and see with that one.
Bears, particularly polar bears, are terrestrial mammals with impressive swimming capabilities - they can swim up to 60 miles without rest and use a modified dog paddle that's remarkably efficient.
To be precise though the species is called Ursus maritimus and it is often considered a semi-aquatic species rather than just a terrestrial mammal.
This is a stretch for what you might consider terrestrial, but polar bears swim faster than olympic athletes. Moose also swim hella fast, so funnily enough it's the same guys in water as on land that you have to look out for.
I had no idea how enormous moose were until I had to go to Fairbanks a few years ago for a work thing. It was unreal sitting in line waiting to move through the gate at the air base and seeing a moose casually running down along the 8 foot fence along the perimeter and realizing it was taller than the fence!
Polar bears are huge too.
IIRC, I read somewhere that they are the biggest species of bear (on average).
Checked:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_bear
Hippos famously cannot swim, despite spending lots of time in water. They're too dense to float. There used to be a BBC filler video in the UK that featured an animation of hippos swimming from below. It was pure fantasy. In reality they hop along the bottom.
Beavers, with their wide flat tails, are very good swimmers. Looking it up though it seems black bears are the fastest overall although I believe beavers are the fastest relative to their body size.
I would definitely consider beavers to be at least partially aquatic, considering they lodge in aquatic environments and need to live near water.
The human body plan is also pretty good for climbing. The dynamism of the human body is why we thrive in so many environments.
That doesn’t surprise me though, considering our ancestors and almost all of our closest relatives are arboreal. We are descended from climbers. Our lack of climbing ability relative to other primates makes us the odd ones out.
Strange comment. Strange because at the high end, I very much doubt that any non-human ape will ever get close to Adam Ondra's ascent of "Silence" (9c). On the other hand, the average human is very much less able to climb trees and other topologically similar objects than most apes. So I am not sure that it really makes sense to talk about "our lack of climbing ability" - in humans, it is unevenly exercised and thus shows huge range, but the best humans can climb in ways that I doubt most or any other apes could.
Chrome's marketing budget is nearly as large as Mozilla's entire budget. They spent a couple of years actively targeting Firefox users with Chrome ads on the frontpage of google.com, and got Adobe Flash and Java and most of the free antivirus solutions to auto-install Chrome and make it the default browser.
I have yet to hear anyone on HN present an argument for how Mozilla could effectively counter that onslaught. Certainly not without using methods that they would also have complained about. (Though nobody seems to hold Chrome's bloatware tactics against them for some reason).
I'm intrigued as to which comment this was supposed to be a reply to, and how it got here.
Likely a reply to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44550764
> Strange comment.
Not realy. It is pretty common to compare the average ability when we are comparing between species. For example when we say cheetahs can run at X m/s we don’t talk about the speed of the fastest cheetah who won the cheetah olympics. They just measured a few and we use that as a basis.
> I very much doubt that any non-human ape will ever get close to Adam Ondra's ascent of "Silence" (9c).
I don’t know what you base this on. Is this just a hunch? Are we talking here about the chances of a monkey randomly catching a fancy for that cliff? Because i agree that is unlikely to happen. But with a sufficintly trained and motivated one I wouldn’t be so sure.
> The dynamism of the human body is why we thrive in so many environments.
I'd say it's our hand to make tools, our brain to plan, and out throat/mouth to communicate
Otters are pretty good, and they're basically mustelid-shaped. Long and thin.
> When I learned that (nearly?) all terrestrial mammals can swim to some degree (even ones that look like they shouldn’t be able to - like ungulates)
Even elephants can swim. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpD40ewOyC4
I must be way above the median age here if I'm the first to mention how much this looks like what when I was a teenager we called the "Man from Atlantis" stroke. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_from_Atlantis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mTn59Ud77k
> I reach out to Misty Hyman, who won gold in the 2000 Olympics...
Her name always makes me laugh because I then think about her brother's name: Buster.
Have you ever heard of Fanny Chmelar?
In what sport does she compete for Germany? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_Klz5qncZQ
Many years later, Bradley Walsh actually met Fanny Chmelar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rb-DYY0upBo
Can a native English speaker please explain this thread to me? (and any other lost ESL readers)
I've tried reading all these names out loud and don't get what's funny.
Fanny Chmelar is pronounced "Fanny Schmeller", which sounds a bit like "Fanny Smeller"
Misty could mean smoky too!
Really would love to see a true freestyle category — with the 15m rule removed. I'm curious why it's not a thing.
I think the rule was created because underwater racing is not that interesting to watch for spectators and more difficult to officiate from the surface. Maybe all we need is a bunch of GoPros stuck around the pool and we can see a new race category?
A swim coach told me that in 1950s people used to do the first lap of breaststroke underwater but people kept passing out. It wasn't safe for youth sports.
The real reason is safety. People have known about the efficiency of swimming under water for the longest time, but competitors would pass out or even die when they held their breath too long. So the rules changed to force people to the surface.
Being interesting for participants is not enough?
Aside from swimmers themselves, nobody else cares about competitive swimming outside of the Olympics.
There is a sport called finswimming which has underwater speed disciplines (apnea or with bottles). But as the name implies it comes with the use of fins.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finswimming
> I'm curious why it's not a thing.
According to onlypassingthru in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44542370 "The optics of an underwater race were not good".
Additionally consider (as was pointed by swarnie in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44542285 ) that there exist clothing restrictions in Olympic swimming - in my opinion this is also a contradiction to the spirit of "freestyle".
The usual argument against clothing restrictions (see also supershoes in running and various aero stuff in cycling) is that you want the sport to reward the best athletes rather than turning into a technological arms race. This is especially complicated in sports where people don't get to choose their own gear and so (for instance), whether you have access to the best shoes depends on who your sponsor is. Back when Nike was first rolling out the first supershoes, you would sometimes see athletes sponsored by other brands actually wear Nikes with the logo blacked out, because it was just such a big advantage.
As another comparison point, look at Formula 1, where technology is a huge part of the competition, with the result that a driver can be dominant one year and then fall way back the next because of some technological shift. Of course, even F1 does tinker with the rules a lot to try to preserve competition, as when they banned electronic stabilization.
F1 is a weird one. Technology can make a massive difference. I remember the 1970s when a car with a skirt destroyed the opposition by sticking to the ground and the six wheeled beasties and the other wacky stuff.
Sponsored by fags (obviously)
F1 is all about the drivers except it is also all about the marques (who pay quite a lot for it and need to show a return).
The rule book for F1 is pretty daunting these days and I'm not too sure how much is driver and how much is car these days. I do know that F1 drivers do abuse themselves badly during a race - they experience G forces that would make you and I weep and probably pass out.
It's all for our entertainment so all good 8)
> there exist clothing restrictions in Olympic swimming
My argument against this is that there are already so many activities where less wealthy are priced out. Most prospective athletes (or families) don't have a bunch of money to shell out for stuff like hydrophobic full-body suits, or hockey gear, or whatever.
For one, clothes aren't a technique.
let's start by not disallowing butterfly
underwater restriction at least makes safety sense - stroke restrictions do not
> “It’s hard to fathom that this could happen in track and field,” says Rick Madge, a swim coach and blogger.
This was an amusing comment considering it is pretty much exactly what happened with the Fosbury Flop.
Cool article though. I wonder if eventually a new event will be added for it in competitive swimming.
20 years ago when I was learning to swim by myself (spoiler: i still do not swim) I had the intuition that a movement like this would work. I actually felt it in muscles, not sure how to better explain it. Very similar to preparing for a climbing route. But after a couple of complete failures I gave up.
Personally I think finswimming is the way to make up for humans being land animals. Fins can extend the range I can swim at least 20x to what I can do without them.
Very cool. Should probably have a (2015) though.
Reminds me of the fascinating efficiency of fish, where even a dead fish can swim upstream, given the right kind of vortices.
I wonder how much potential for improvement there still is for the human body.
https://fyfluiddynamics.com/2018/07/when-i-was-a-child-my-fa...
IIRC, the backstroke races at the 1996 Olympics were pushing the boundaries of human potential as competitors swam some or all of the races underwater. The optics of an underwater race were not good (ha!). As a result, FINA made it mandatory to surface and compete in actual backstroke instead of underwater dolphin kick.
the backstroke rule change was circa 1988. They changed butterfly (and I suppose freestyle) after the 96 Olympics when Dennis Pankratov won both butterflies with this technique. Interestingly, the backstroke innovator who probably triggered the earlier rule change got beat in the final by someone not using it (Berkhoff in 88, silver)
The latest rule change in this area was banning dolphin kicks on your back on the breast-to-free exchange in IM. Ryan Lochte triggered that one.
According to the article it was 1998...
"That all changed in 1998, when FINA, the world governing body of competitive swimming, ruled that swimmers performing the backstroke had to surface after 15 meters."
... which aligns with my recollection of the '96 Olympics and being gobsmacked at how long the swimmers were holding their breath.
The article is wrong. That’s when they changed it for fly/free.
Here is the 92 backstroke final. The announcers mention the rule: https://youtu.be/FTfTyzkSzQs?si=E82rvKql-w9vuwSf
I tried to find 96 and cannot but it was the same.
Here is the butterfly performance in 96 that ultimately triggered them to chamge it for fly/free: https://youtu.be/Zp2NTFjeXQQ?si=e_E-D1ZAvzNmjACe
I haven't seen that final in 29 years, thanks.
Pankratov's start really was incredible. His lungs have to be off the scale.
They would swim the entire 50m underwater, if given the chance. I've seen them do so in practice, very lazy-looking dolphin kicks, but still faster than most swimmers on the surface.
What improvements are you thinking?
I see three avenues:
1) Clothing - Already banned in the Olympics
2) Medication - Also officially banned in the Olympics but the Enhanced Games look like a promising test bed.
3) Go full Cult Mechanicum?
I was thinking of optimized movement patterns to increase efficiency / reduce wasted energy. This numberphile video explains how fish and other swimming animals barely lose any energy, even though they create vortices, because the vortices are in turn used to propel the fish forward.
https://youtu.be/wYDh5d9pfu8?si=TkPs2xcngduz_Qem&t=600
growing your body optimized for swimming. The training is one thing. I mean shaping your body into the hydrodynamically optimized form, like say growing some muscles (or fat - shaping yourself into a more dolhpin like shape :) here and there mostly for the purpose of better resulting hydrodynamic shape. With the medicine advances it may start earlier in life and be non-catchable by the sports authorities.
And, if you look at one of the Chinese Olympic winners last year - the wave in front of him was significantly smaller than in front of anybody else. Have no idea how he achieved that though.
Dumb q, never learned to swim and don't understand the sport contextually.
Given:
"Some especially strong underwater swimmers stayed submerged almost the entire length of the pool, since there was no rule against it. That all changed in 1998, when FINA, the world governing body of competitive swimming, ruled that swimmers performing the backstroke had to surface after 15 meters."
This is used to explain a conclusion used throughout the rest of the article, namely, the dolphin/fish strokes aren't useful in competitive swimming because people using them have to surface.
But I don't understand: the rule says swimmers performing the backstroke have to surface, and when I look up backstroke, it is someone laying on their back? Which doesn't sound like either of these
> the rule says swimmers performing the backstroke have to surface, and when I look up backstroke, it is someone laying on their back? Which doesn't sound like either of these
The updated rules essentially say a swimmer in a "backstroke race" must perform the backstroke for 35 meters. Prior to this rule, top swimmers would stay underwater for most of a length and only do a few actual back strokes before their flip turn.
In other words, before this rule they mostly were not performing the backstroke, despite the name of the race.
Ahhhh, after reading this, I think the part I was missing is swimming events aren't general w/r/t method
i.e. I'm familiar with track and field - it's "transport yourself X distance, fastest time wins"
With swimming, its "transport yourself X distance using method Y"
And you could have used the methods described in a race where method Y == backstroke at some point, as the requirements for backstroke were such that you just did a couple things quick, then could go underwater and do your thing till you finish...but that workaround is no longer available given the 15m rule.
(ty all)
These short videos should clear it up:
Backstroke start technique: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwq-IsGNa28
Backstroke flipturn technique: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-WNtRGwSjQ
Underwater dolphin kicks can be done on your front, back, or (I guess) side, so it also works for backstroke. And the way that starts and turns work in backstroke still puts you underwater at the start of each lap.
There was a brief period where the fastest backstrokers in the world would swim almost the entire length of the pool underwater using the upside down dolphin kick because it is faster than swimming on the surface for the reasons described in the article.
(2015 article)
I get that it's a quirk of the sport's history, but it's funny and dumb that swimming awards medals and records for being the fastest at a slower stroke. It's like if track meets would have a 100m sprint, a 100m skip, and a 100m run-backwards.
If I could change things in the world, I wouldn't eliminate the extraneous strokes in swimming, but I would include additional competitions in all the track distances: backwards running, handstand walk, and one-legged hopping.
Olympics have different 'strokes' used between sprint, middle distance, long distance, hurdles, steeplechase and walking races - so there is some variety in the locomotion forms unlike your strawman.
The walking race is the only one where there are specific rules. The other races just happen to mostly favor a style. Sprint finishes in long distance races are common and legal
Oh, I didn't realize there were 100m, 200m, 400m, 800m, 1500m, etc walking races.
Is the variety in locomotion in the races you listed regulated by the governing body? Like, would you be DQ'd if you skipped the last 50m of a 100m dash?
For the record, I would fully endorse a "hurdles" equivalent in swimming: put an obstacle every 10m that the swimmers have to go under. Make the lanes zig-zag.
There's at least a couple of different runs, relay and hurdles are examples of variations on pure running. And if you squint, ice skating in a lot of ways is just a different style of running (with blades on the feet). Though you might then argue that rowing is a type of swimming with oars and a boat :)
The jumping events do have different "strokes": long jump, (standing) broad jump, triple jump, possibly-etc. As far as I know, there is no generalized "transport yourself X distance without touching the ground" event. (Although I could be wrong.)
It is annoying that rules were added to the “freestyle” race, to preclude these new better underwater forms of swimming. Freestyle ought to mean you are free to pick any style.
The rule is only on the IM; freestyle can't be butterfly, backstroke, or breaststroke.
They added a rule in 1998, you can only go 15 meters underwater after the flip. Although I guess there are safety concerns, which seems reasonable…
But why do we need this rule if front crawl is faster anyway?
IM stands for individual medley so it makes sense that they’d restrict the swimming types in that race
Each of the major strokes has a distinct functional example: front crawl is fastest, breaststroke lets you sight directly in front of you with each breath (which is useful in general open water), and backstroke allows you to breath uninterrupted.
It makes sense to me to have different stroke events, although I wish there was a true freestyle that allowed for anything, including underwater.
I think there are too many swimming events in the Olympics. If the same few people win most of the medals then maybe the events are too similar.
Please eliminate two. PS I am NOT a crackpot
I couldn’t agree more!
Swimming needs a corkscrew race!
Butterfly is my favorite. It’s so fun to fly through the water like that.
My daughter’s school had a race day to wrap up their swimming lessons, and one of the events involved rolling from front to back every second stroke. It was funny to watch but not very practical.
Sounds like burlap sack or 3-legged races. Completely impractical forms of locomotion, and irrelevant because that's not the point of the activity.
It is also my favorite, despite being the hardest due to the high skill required to do the proper technique. It is so awesome to feel so powerful.
I can't wait for you to find out there are different kinds of track competitions.
Seeing backwards running races would be impressive. Seeing the fastest human runners is also very impressive, but it’s also less interesting in a sense because they’re doing exactly what our bodies evolved to be able to do. It is interesting to see that ability pushed to its natural limits, but I think it’s a bit more interesting to see people excel in things we didn’t evolve to do: like swimming or running backwards.
> Seeing backwards running races would be impressive.
For cars, such races seem to exist (have existed?) in the Netherlands:
> Dutch Reverse Racing
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLgPTJWAysY
These kinds of races seemed to be popular in the Netherlands because DAF (a Dutch manufacturer) produces the Variomatic transmission system
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variomatic
"Because the system does not have separate gears, but one (continuously shifting) gear and a separate 'reverse mode' (as opposed to reverse gear), the transmission works in reverse as well, giving it the side effect that one can drive backwards as fast as forwards. As a result, in the former Dutch annual backward driving world championship, the DAFs had to be put in a separate competition because no other car could keep up."
Diagonal running!
> I get that it's a quirk of the sport's history, but it's funny and dumb that swimming awards medals and records for being the fastest at a slower stroke. It's like if track meets would have a 100m sprint, a 100m skip, and a 100m run-backwards.
This is arguably what race walking is, though it's over longer distances.
Well, race walking is also a thing. And, although not fully analogous, track and field has hurdles.
1500 meter running and 1500 meter race walking are two track events with different ambulatory styles.
i'd guess it is faster than the physically the same, just 90 degree rotated, dolphin kick only because of the proximity to the surface - in the dolphin kick significant energy gets wasted as the surface wave (i.e. instead of pushing yourself from the large mass of water, you push the smaller amount of water above you into a surface wave, the same reason you want your boat prop to be as deep as possible). My bet would be that the fish and dolphin kicks would give the same performance if both performed at sufficient depth, like 5-10 meters.
Hmm, divers have known the dolphin kick for years (decades?) as a way to move underwater at speed, but you’re rarely near the surface or the bottom to have effects from the surface interfaces. Interesting.
They have dynamic apnea competitions. It's in the freedive scene not swim/race scene. I'm not sure if turning sideways is popular there.
If people start racing underwater, there will probably lots of blackouts.