An American freestyle swimmer who competed in the first modern Olympic Games in 1896 jumped in and right back out again, complaining that the water was too cold. The developer of the butterfly kick was a physicist who later worked on the Manhattan Project. In 1926, New Yorker Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to make the Channel crossing and the first to use crawl, which allowed her to finish in fourteen and a half hours, two hours faster than the record. In 1875, Matthew Webb, a Royal Navy captain, made the first successful cross-Channel swim he drowned eight years later while trying to swim across the Niagara River. Benjamin Franklin and Lord Byron helped repopularise swimming, and as it became popular over the 19th century, when the first public pools were built in Britain (in 1828) and the USA (in 1868), swimmers in those countries stubbornly stuck to breaststroke, snubbing the front crawl of indigenous peoples in the Americas and the South Pacific as uncivilised.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, swimming all but vanished from Europe for over a thousand years – it was thought unhealthy and even a sign of witchcraft. The ancient Greeks often triumphed in battle due to their swimming prowess. The first-known depictions of swimming are pictographs made eight thousand years ago on the walls of the so-called Cave of the Swimmers in the middle of the Sahara, where there were once deep-water lakes. We jumped into the pool in vintage dresses to see what it was like to swim hampered by heavy fabrics. We competed in novelty races that predated the streamlining of swimming into a competitive sport, swimming upright holding umbrellas in one race, wearing blindfolds in another.
Until I read Howard Means’s Splash! and Bonnie Tsui’s Why We Swim, my main encounter with the history of the sport had been a Victorian-inspired swimming gala organised by members of my local team at north London’s Parliament Hill Lido.
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