Swimming in the London Olympics 2012

Speed, strength and stamina will be key for athletes in the Swimming competition at the London 2012 Games, which features no fewer than 34 medal events.

Key Swimming facts

Venue: Aquatics Centre – Olympic Park (pool events); Hyde Park (Marathon Swimming 10km)
Dates: Saturday 28 July – Saturday 4 August (Aquatics Centre); Thursday 9 – Friday 10 August (Hyde Park)
Medal events: 34
Athletes: 950

Evidence of people swimming for sport dates all the way back to Ancient Egyptian and Ancient Greek times. Now hugely popular around the world as a leisure activity and a competitive sport, Swimming has featured at every modern Games and remains a real Olympic crowd-pleaser.

Interesting Swimming & Olympics Vignettes

Underwater Swimming featured at the Paris 1900 Games. Competitors earned points for the length of time and distance they were underwater.

The crawl technique used in Freestyle Swimming was developed by a British swimming instructor named J Arthur Trudgeon, who based it on a Native American style of swimming that he had discovered during a trip to South America in the 1870s.

Johnny Weissmuller, the first man to swim 100 metres in under a minute, was just as famous out of the pool: he played the role of Tarzan in 12 times on the silver screen.

The first official tie for a gold medal in Olympic Swimming history came in Los Angeles 1984, when American teammates Nancy Hogshead and Carrie Steinseifer swam identical times in the 100m Freestyle event.

The swimming pool for the London 1908 Olympic Games was built on the infield of the Athletics track at White City Stadium, and the competition was held outdoors.

Interesting Swimming Facts

The basics
There are four strokes used in Olympic competition: Freestyle (essentially, front crawl), Backstroke, Breaststroke and Butterfly. All four strokes feature in the Individual Medley and Medley Relay events.

Olympic races are conducted over a variety of distances, from 50m (one length of the pool) all the way up to 1500m. All the pool events begin with heats, with the best swimmers from the qualifying rounds eventually racing for gold in the final.

Olympic Swimming, past and present

At the first few modern Olympic Games, Swimming events were held in open water. At Paris in 1900, for instance, they took place in the River Seine. However, the rules were formalised in 1908, when the London Games staged the first Olympic Swimming competition to be held in a pool.
Other than the Marathon Swimming 10km event, held in the Serpentine within Hyde Park, the Swimming competition will take place in the dazzling Aquatics Centre, built in the Olympic Park especially for London 2012.

Jargon buster

Long course: A 50m pool of the type used in Olympic competition, as opposed to a short course measuring 25m.
Medley: A combination event in which a swimmer or team swims separate legs of backstroke, breaststroke, butterfly and freestyle.
Negative split: When an athlete swims the second half of a race faster than the first half.
Open turn: A type of turn for which swimmers must touch the end of the pool with their hands.
Tumble turn: An underwater roll at the end of a lap, which allows swimmers to push off from the end of the pool with their feet.

Information on the London Olympics & Paralympics 2012