8/12/00
Swimming: A Feeling For Water
Summary:
This week, the culture of swimming.
Former Olympic champion SHANE GOULD and marathon swimmer SHELLEY TAYLOR-SMITH both took to swimming as a result of health problems in childhood. They both still feel most at home in the water, and revel in its sensual pleasures.
The same was true of the poet Byron. According to Charles Sprawson, author of "Haunts of the Black Masseur - the Swimmer as Hero", Romantic poets like Byron led the 19th century English revival of swimming.
Historian MURRAY PHILLIPS, who's currently working on a history of Australian swimming, details the development of the "Australian crawl", which revolutionised competitive swimming early in the 20th century, and which was also at one stage known as the "Japanese crawl". And another former Olympic champion, JOHN KONRADS, who learnt to swim at a migrant hostel in New South Wales, provides a few tips on swimming this stroke.
Details or Transcript:
THEME
Amanda Smith: On The Sports Factor this week, swimming: the joy of swimming, the culture of swimming; and the dangers of the deep.
In Australia we pride ourselves on being a nation of swimmers, and of swimming champions. And on being the inventors of the Australian Crawl, the stroke that revolutionised swimming at the beginning of the 20th century. Later in the program, we’ll consider just how Australian the Australian Crawl is. We’ll also look at the revival of swimming in England in the 19th century, inspired by the English Romantic poets.
Before that, though, the swimmer’s feeling for water.
SPLASH
Shane Gould: For me in the swimming, having harmony with the water was really important, and I still love swimming. In fact I need it, nearly need it to survive. I need some sort of activity but the water is something that I feel most at home in. Running, I just feel totally out of whack, my body just does not have the flow to run. But swimming, yes, I can get into the zone, and it’s a very peaceful, relaxing place for me to be.
Amanda Smith: That’s the former Olympic swimming champion, Shane Gould, the teenage sensation of the 1972 Munich Olympics. Like many swimming champions, Shane Gould first learnt to swim, and to love water because of health problems. This was when she was a very young child, living with her family in Fiji.
Shane Gould: It was a fantastic seven years in Fiji and I did love the water. Because I had an accident when I was 18 months old, (I poured boiling hot water over myself and it reacted with a smallpox injection) I got very sick and I had inflammation of the brain, and I was very lethargic. So when I got in the water, my father took me in the water, he said I came alive. So naturally, his parental concern, he kept taking me there and very soon I learnt to swim and any lethargy I had was soon left way behind, and I became very boisterous and only the swimming pool then could remove that energy.
I think I have a thing called physical intelligence; you know, there’s a theory of multiple intelligences: we have musical intelligence, mathematical logical intelligence that our Western society prizes; and the spatial intelligence that the sailors in the Pacific Islands prize for navigating. So the physical intelligence is a kinaesthetic thing, so perhaps a sculptor might have kinaesthetic as well as spatial intelligence. But for an athlete, they use their body to feel and to express themselves, and there’s a very good sense of awareness of their body. And I had that, and I needed to express that. And eventually got into more training and so the training I loved because it was a fulfilment of my gift and that intelligence that I had. So the training was a kind of sensuous thing as well, and having that kinaesthetic, that feeling intelligence, I often talk a lot about feel. And if you like at Michael Klim and a number of other swimmers are doing it now, when they get onto their blocks before the start of their race they rub their hands on the top of the blocks and perhaps their lower arms between the elbows and the wrists and that’s to heighten sensitivity of the nerve endings, so that when they get in the water they’ve got very good feel for the water, because ultimately the best swimmer’s going to be the one that has the least resistance through the water, and if they can feel and find that gap through the water, they’re going to be more likely to be the fastest ones.
Amanda Smith: As we’ve seen with Michael Klim and others at the World Cup Competition that was held in Melbourne this week. And that was former champion of the pool, Shane Gould.
Now someone else who’s spent a lot of her life getting wet, in fact her nickname as a competitor was ‘Dangerous When Wet’, is marathon swimmer Shelley Taylor-Smith, a world champion several times over during her swimming career. As a teenager in Western Australia, Shelley was a very promising pool swimmer, even though she had scoliosis (an abnormal curvature of the spine). She was awarded a swim scholarship to the University of Arkansas in the USA, and it was while she was training there that her coach noticed that the further Shelly swam, the faster she got; hence the switch from the pool to the open waters, and long-distance swimming.
Shelly Taylor-Smith: Yes, back in 1982 I was just a little nipper, I was 21 years of age, and went over there and we did pre-season training in ’83 in Beaver Lake, Arkansas, and my coach, Sam Free, said ‘Well see that big rock up the other end up there? I want you all to swim up there and back.’ And everybody was whinging because there was no black line on the bottom of the lake to keep us company, so the men’s and women’s team, off we trotted and we swam up there and back, and I came back first. And the interesting thing was a few days later my coach said, ‘You know, you’ve got the potential to be a world champion in marathon swimming’ and I said, ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘Just keep swimming.’ So a year later I went off to Manhattan, and that’s where it all began.
Amanda Smith: And the thing is, your coach really noticed that in fact that the further you swam the faster you got.
Shelly Taylor-Smith: Yes that was the interesting thing in that the pre-season training in Beaver Lake after that, he noticed that I just seemed to hold my speed, and the further I went I seemed to be able to hold my consistent stroke rate while everybody else seemed to fall apart.
Amanda Smith: Well marathon swimming in rivers, lakes, and the open sea, is much more fraught and unpredictable and dangerous to your health, than swimming up and down in straight lines in a pool. Is it the degree of difficulty that’s part of its appeal for you?
Shelly Taylor-Smith: I think it’s interesting in that I found my niche in life in open water, and as a result I learned about this sport which is second to none as far as I’m concerned. It’s never boring, never monotonous, you have to predict the unknown, you have to be literally on your toes because you never know what Mother Nature’s going to throw at you, and in comparison with pool swimming, the variables are always constant, you know what the water temperature’s going to be, it has to be a certain temperature, you know there’s eight people in the final, you know you have to come first in order to win. In contrast to that and open water swimming, you know you could be in salt water, you might not be in salt water, there might be a lot of marine life if you’re fortunate, there might not be much at all, and then you’re worrying about 'Oh, if there’s not much marine life, what’s wrong with the water?'
Amanda Smith: Has your motivation for competitive swimming changed over time, say from when you were a little kid winning State championships in W.A. through to now?
Shelly Taylor-Smith: Oh absolutely. My competitiveness has changed in that winning as a child meant a lot to me, but so much to my family, in particular my mother, and to me it was like conditional love, which is very sad in retrospect when I look back. But now when I win, it’s not so much about coming first, than if you learn from defeat then you’ve never lost. So that life to me every day, whether it’s in the water or out of the water, is a great challenge, and every day is another experience, and a learning experience.
Amanda Smith: Well your nickname, Shelly is ‘Dangerous When Wet’; do you feel that you are actually a more complete person when you’re wet, when you’re competing?
Shelly Taylor-Smith: Oh look, you know, it’s quite embarrassing because I fall over all the time in the cracks in the road. But yes, when I’m in the water I really do feel complete, and at times I have felt untouchable, I can honestly say that, and when I’m out there, there’s an air, an awe of me, and it’s not arrogance it’s just a real confidence boost, and I feel complete within.
Amanda Smith: Shelly Taylor-Smith, one of the many highly successful long-distance swimmers who’ve come from Australia over the years.
Now England is not a country currently known for its swimming success in international competition. But it was in this country that the craze for getting wet, for pleasure and sport, was rediscovered in the 19th century. Charles Sprawson is the author of what’s now become a much admired book about the swimmer in myth and history. It’s called ‘Haunts of the Black Masseur’, and according to Charles Sprawson, bathing and swimming had all but disappeared from Europe after the decline of the Roman Empire. So why this revival in 19th century England?
Charles Sprawson: Well it was such an adventurous nation in the 19th century, and so many Englishmen went abroad and not only did they swim abroad and amaze foreigners by their swimming, but in England there were four or five permanent swimming pools, which was very unusual at that time. And there were piers on the coast and swimming competitions held on the coasts of England, and there was a wonderful swimming atmosphere in the summer in England, which was unique in the world at that time.
Amanda Smith: Well tell me about the role of the 19th century English Romantic poets in all this, particularly Shelley and Byron in this revival of swimming in Europe.
Charles Sprawson: I think another of the impulses for swimming in England at that time was the interest in classicism, and the Romantic poets, especially Shelley and Byron, found in swimming a means of getting in touch with the ancient classical civilisation, and Shelley of course loved water; he couldn’t swim but he loved being immersed in water, and eventually he drowned and people say he could have saved himself, but he just let himself sink to the bottom of the sea off Lerici and the sort of inspiration behind his feeling for water was classical; he loved the Greek myths to do with water, like Narcissus and Hermaphrodite and he felt water was a kind of enervating, erotic force. And Byron too, was not quite so spiritually enticed by water, but he just loved swimming because he had a lame foot and only in water could he sort of experience liberation of movement that he couldn’t experience on land.
Amanda Smith: Well how in the minds of the poets Shelley and Byron was swimming linked to this classical past?
Charles Sprawson: Well with Shelley it was the sort of classical feeling for water, water as a kind of seductive, erotic, liberating force, the kind of descriptions of water you find in Greek and Latin poets, in their myths. Byron was swimming with something more athletic, although he was a classicist, and loved swimming off the Mediterranean coastline, especially where famous battles had been fought between the Greeks and Romans, and the Greeks themselves.
Amanda Smith: Well what was the source of European interest in the classical world at this time?
Charles Sprawson: Well it wasn’t European so much as English; English classical tradition was very strong, and the English and the Germans were the foremost classicists in the 19th century. And when they rediscovered Pompeii in 1757 they opened up again the sort of Roman feeling for water, because they discovered these enormous long baths everywhere, throughout the classical world, particularly in Pompeii, which was a sort of famous resort of the Romans. And this revived again the classical feeling for water that had been neglected for so long, for centuries. Christianity had rather submerged the sort of classical feeling for water; for the Christians it was something contemptible and associated with the plague and the breaststroke evolved because it held one’s head above the water and one’s arms sort of reaching out forward, one’s arms brushed away anything harmful that might enter the mouth.
Amanda Smith: Now you’ve written this book about the swimmer as a hero from your own fascination with immersing yourself in water, and in many ways your thesis about the English revival of swimming through the Romantic poets and their classical interests is paralleled in your own experience. One of the most evocative passages in your book is where you describe your childhood Christmases among the Greek ruins of Cyrene in North Africa. Could I get you to perhaps recount swimming there?
Charles Sprawson: Yes, well I learnt to swim in India, that’s where I was brought up, and my father moved to North Africa and we used to spend Christmases in this deserted hotel near Benghazi on the coast. And the place was called Cyrene and it was an old Roman or Greek town, and offshore there was an old Greek city submerged beneath the waves, and near it, on the shore, was this lovely rock pool surrounded by anemones and it was where Cleopatra was reputed to have swum. And we used to, every Christmas Day, swim in this rock pool and then swim out into the sea with our masks and look down at this submerged city, and giant rays used to swim through the columns. And it was all very mysterious, and it gave me some idea or some instinct for the sort of classical inspiration for swimming.
Amanda Smith: Charles Sprawson, the author of ‘Haunts of the Black Masseur – The Swimmer as Hero’, a most delicious book about swimming and our relationship with water.
The Australian relationship with water is something that sports historian Murray Phillips is currently occupied with. He’s writing a history of Australian swimming. And probably the most significant development in the history of swimming world-wide, was the invention of the stroke known as the Australian crawl. But how Australian is the Australian crawl? Murray Phillips.
Murray Phillips: Well the interesting thing about that stroke is that it has a very, very long history. If you look even right back to the ancient Egyptians in some of the hieroglyphics we can see images of people swimming with overarm strokes, and if we look at the Romans who had a swimming school, they also used an overarm stroke as part of their swimming technique. So it certainly goes back a long way in history, the overarm stroke itself. And if you look at the Pacific Islands prior to the establishment of Australia, there is again, history and examples of natives using overarm strokes to swim, because it was an ideal way in which they could catch waves. You can’t catch waves if you’re using breaststroke, the ideal way to body surf and to catch waves in those contexts was to use an overarm stroke with a flutter sort of a kick.
So the crawl itself has a very long history. What Australia’s major contribution was, that it actually used the stroke in competitive swimming.
Amanda Smith: So when did this happen and who’s credited with it?
Murray Phillips: Well as usual in history, a single person is given the honour of being the originator or the initiator of a particular stroke or a particular sport in some cases, and in swimming it’s Alec Wickham, who was a Solomon Islander who came to Australia in the late 1890s, and people saw him swim this really crazy stroke. Someone said, ‘He looks like he’s crawling over the water’, one of the early coaches said, and that’s what the origin of the crawl stroke is.
Amanda Smith: And were there particular refinements made to the stroke from what had been used as an overarm stroke that made it the Australian crawl?
Murray Phillips: Well it was really introduced into competition. And it was introduced in the competition in a way that the Australians put their head down, swam with alternate arms and with a deep flutter sort of a kick. But the interesting thing was that they hadn’t perfected breathing to that point. So the Australians would do five or six strokes, or seven or eight strokes, and then come up for air, and then dig their head down and plough into the water again and splashing and flailing their arms everywhere. And the big innovation came from an Australian, Cecil Healy, who actually died on the battlefronts of World War I and he developed breathing to the side. And this was an incredibly important innovation, because it meant that you could actually develop a continuous stroke and you could do it over longer distances, because the biggest problem with the crawl was, it was extremely effective over 20, 30, maybe even 50 yards, but it was never done over anything over 100 yards, it was just too tiring.
Amanda Smith: So Murray, how quickly did the Aussie crawl stroke catch on internationally, in competition?
Murray Phillips: Well initially, it was really rejected by the British; that’s sort of quite early. Indian swimmers in the 1850s actually used it in competition in England, and the British said, ‘Oh, what a horrible, ungainly, unmanly sort of a stroke that is, splashing and flailing their arms everywhere in the pool.’ And similarly, when some of the Australians took the stroke across at the turn of the century, the response was very similar. It was only when the Australians had great success in swimming, using the crawl, did it actually catch on in the UK and finally in the US, who actually transformed the stroke at another level from the Australians.
Amanda Smith: The thing that interests me that I think we tend to forget now too, just moving along a bit in history, is how strong the Japanese were at this stroke in the 1930s.
Murray Phillips: Well that’s certainly the case. When you look through the Olympic records, it’s really quite a surprise to see that. In the ’32 Games and the ’36 Games, that the Japanese dominated swimming. They dominated the crawl stroke, they dominated the 100 yards, they dominated the relays, winning the Gold Medals. So it was the Japanese who followed on from the Americans to again create innovations in the style of swimming the crawl. I’ve got some wonderful documents that explain how to swim the Japanese crawl, in the 1930s.
Amanda Smith: So it was actually called the Japanese crawl at that time?
Murray Phillips: In each case it went through iterations, it was the Australian crawl, it became the American crawl, it became the Japanese crawl, and in each one of those cases, it was those specific countries who made contributions, and innovations to the stroke to make it much more efficient, and therefore much faster and those swimmers then dominated respective Olympic Games. So you find that the Australians did very well, the Americans dominated, then in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s and ’36 Games, Japanese dominated.
Amanda Smith: Well in contemporary times, perhaps it should be called the Dutch-Australian crawl.
Murray Phillips: That’s totally true.
Amanda Smith: Murray Phillips, who lectures in sports studies at the University of Queensland, and who’s currently writing a history of Australian swimming.
Well John Konrads is someone who’s place in the history of Australian swimming is assured. In the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, John held numerous world records. And at the 1960 Rome Olympic Games, won the Gold Medal in the 1500 metres freestyle, the event Australian men have so often dominated.
John Konrads learnt to swim when he was seven years old, after his family came to Australia as post-war refugees.
John Konrads: I learnt to swim at the Uranquinty Migrants Hostel near Wagga, and my family emigrated from Europe as refugees, initially out of Latvia, but then directly out of Germany, in 1949, and we happened to land in this lovely, well I guess it wasn’t all that much fun for my parents, but us kids loved it because we had a swimming pool there, it was an Air Force base during the Second World War. And we learnt to swim there; the days were hot. But what really happened was that I got a touch of polio; fortunately I got over it pretty quickly, but I was a month in hospital, the Wagga Base Hospital, I think it was the Christmas of 1950, but I had learnt to swim before that, in fact I got polio at the pool, and it was going around like wildfire there, and I was just very lucky to not be affected by it.
Amanda Smith: And you were also lucky enough I understand to have at your primary school a teacher, the very young Don Talbot. So your first swimming lessons obviously weren’t with Don Talbot, but very early on he took you under his wing?
John Konrads: Yes I just went on to Sydney and liked swimming; I seemed to be faster than the other kids, and that was a good ego trip, so I used to try to race kids across the pool. Then when I got to Revesby Primary School I asked around and said, ‘Well do we have any swimming races at this school?’ They said, ‘No, schools don’t have swimming races except for High School, but there’s this young teacher called Don Talbot who’s doing, I don’t know, fourth grade maths, or whatever it is, and go and talk to him’. Don was then 19 years old, and in those days I think there was an accelerated Teachers’ College where in 18 months they could become teachers. Anyhow Don was 19 years old, he was an apprentice coach at the Bankstown Baths, and just starting out. So one day I hopped on the back of his motorbike, we went to Bankstown Baths, got a time trial, and joined the Bankstown Swimming Club, and it all snowballed from there.
Amanda Smith: John Konrads retired from competitive swimming after the Tokyo Olympic Games of 1964. For a time he coached swimmers, then moved into the business world. In more recent years, he’s returned to his first love, running clinics and producing ‘How to Swim’ videos.
John Konrads: I’ve been getting back into swimming the last few years after not swimming, well hardly at all, certainly not for fitness, for about 20 or 25 years, and got a niggly knee from playing too much tennis, and so I thought 'Well, I’ll start swimming to keep fit', and I just found that I rediscovered swimming, if you like, I just loved it. And going up and down the various pools I noticed that a lot of people are just struggling, in fact the majority of people. And pools are full these days, of adults going up and down. Swimming pools are no longer places to go on a hot Sunday afternoon to dive bomb for kids and do slippery dips; but it’s now full of adults, fitness swimmers, and most of them doing it the hard way.
Amanda Smith: Well what are the most common faults or misconceptions that you find among average adult swimmers, John?
John Konrads: Well one of the problems certainly a couple of decades ago, and even now, a lot of the swimming teaching is not really teaching of the freestyle technique, it teaches kids how not to drown. So unless you go to swim school, and there are very good swim schools around these days, or send your kids to a swim school, if it’s simply a school program or a summertime program, a weekend-type program, you really don’t learn how to swim properly, and the next time you swim you’re 25 years old or 30 years old. Well, you realise you don’t know how to swim.
The most common problems are very simple, and largely psychological if you like, in the subconscious. For example, most people try to swim on top of the water, rather than in it. By that I mean you should swim at floatation depth, but most people subconsciously want to climb out and swim on top of the water and you waste a lot of energy doing that. Another one is that most people kick their legs too hard, particularly people with bad kicks. So if you’re puffed out after 50 metres or 100 metres, I can tell you right now without even seeing anybody swim, you’re kicking your legs too hard, and that’s a subconscious action too, you know, you’re supposed to have a good prop behind you that’s churning up plenty of water, and the swimming kick is not very efficient.
Amanda Smith: Yes, how much does it actually contribute to your forward motion?
John Konrads: Well if you’ve got a good kick, round about 10%.
Amanda Smith: Not much anyway.
John Konrads: That’s right. If you tie your legs up you’ll only swim about 10% slower, and if you’ve got a bad kick, zero. But it’s not unusual to spend more than 50% of your energy on the kick, with no real benefit.
Amanda Smith: The ordinary swimmer who wants to build or maintain fitness through swimming, how often should they be visiting the pool each week?
John Konrads: Well obviously the more the better. But I try to swim the minimum of twice a week, and that’s enough for me. If you like, I swim for about 45 minutes, I don’t swim particularly fast any more, but I just get a terrific workout in 45 minutes. I go about a kilometre to 1½ kilometres. Vary it around a little bit, rather than just going up and down for 20 laps, break it up a bit. Do eight times 100 and have 30 seconds rest in between each one, and that way you can push yourself a bit more.
Amanda Smith: What about varying strokes?
John Konrads: Yes, if you like, although I think the breaststroke and backstroke are pretty uncomfortable for people who aren’t used to it. And people brought up in Europe learnt breastroke to start with and they have difficulty swimming freestyle. Freestyle does give you a complete workout all over, so you don’t really have to vary the stroke unless there’s a particular reason for you to do so. Breaststroke is much more angled on the legs, much more the percentage of power comes from the legs in breaststroke. But then you have to have a reasonably natural frog kick, which means you would have had to learn when you were a kid to have a decent breaststroke. I’m a hopeless breastroker, and you’ll find that good breastrokers can’t do freestyle very well, and vice versa. It’s just such a different stroke.
Amanda Smith: Swimming tips from John Konrads. And given that he broke 34 world freestyle records in his day, you’d have to say he’s a bloke who knows what he’s talking about.
Well we’re now approaching that time of year when so many of us embark on the annual holiday to the coast or river. And even though we do pride ourselves on being a nation of swimmers, in a land ‘girt by sea’, each summer seems to bring multiple drownings and calls for increased swim safety and awareness. So do we have a false sense of our abilities as swimmers, and too little understanding of the risks of swimming in open waters?
Author and occasional aquatics commentator, Shane Maloney thinks we do.
Shane Maloney: Yes, I think that there’s obviously a sharp contradiction between the notion of us as a successful nation of swimmers sitting down in front of the TV watching the great achievements at the World Championships, and then rushing off into the water and drowning, for want of a better word.
Amanda Smith: Well I wonder whether we’ve in fact so completely absorbed the image of Australia being a swimming nation and a beach culture, that we somehow think we have this innate ability, a kind of race memory, of being strong swimmers, so we’ve forgotten that in fact you’re only a strong swimmer if you learn how to be one.
Shane Maloney: Well Australia’s an island nation of course. We all used to learn to swim out of the fear that we might fall off. Some people of course actually got here by swimming in the first place, or their ancestors did. Yes, I think there is a kind of assumption, an automatic assumption, somehow that we find it easy to deal with the water. And that may be true in the swimming pool, but the sea is an entirely different proposition.
Amanda Smith: What about the increasing profile of things like say the professional Iron Person events where we’re watching these people on telly hurling themselves into big surf. Has that in a way inured us to the fact that what they’re doing is risky and highly skilled? I mean, I’ve got this theory that if you watch a lot of sport on television, by some sort of strange process of osmosis you think you play a lot of sport. What do you reckon?
Shane Maloney: I would say that where we do see these people, Iron Persons and so on, performing, we often of course don’t notice that there’s all kinds of safety preparations being made; there are boats lying ready to pluck them out of the water, and it’s interesting I think that a lot of these bluewater swimming events are also having to take a high degree of measures for the safety of their participants.
Amanda Smith: This is the big participation swim classics, Pier to Pub races?
Shane Maloney: That’s exactly the kind of thing. And a number of those in fact have had fatalities, often to do with hypothermia or people having heart attacks, or whatever, which presumably may also happen in swimming pools to a certain extent. But these events are tooled up in a major way for rescues of various sorts. And I think there’s a degree of complacency in entering the surf. Now whether that’s to do with television or a sort of sense of our self-image as swimmers I’m not entirely sure. Perhaps it’s a matter of experience as well. We swim in the sea, sometimes, maybe only once or twice a year. It’s not a major opportunity for us to learn the power of the sea, except perhaps in ways that we don’t want to.
Amanda Smith: A few words of caution from Shane Maloney, for all of us intending to plunge into the waterways over the summer.
And that’s The Sports Factor for another week. I’m Amanda Smith.
Guests on this program:
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Shane Gould Former Olympic swimming champion. |
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Shelley Taylor-Smith Former World Champion long distance swimmer. |
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Charles Sprawson Author of the book "Haunts Of The Black Masseur - The Swimmer As Hero". |
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Murray Phillips Sports Historian who lectures in Sports Studies at the University of Queensland and who is currently writing an history of Australian swimming. |
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John Konrads Former Olympic swimming champion. |
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Shane Maloney Author. |
Publications:
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Haunts Of The Black Masseur - The Swimmer As Hero Author: Charles Sprawson Publisher: Random House, London, 1993 ISBN 0 09 922331 7 |
Presenter:
Amanda Smith
Producer:
Michael Shirrefs
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