For me the wonder of seeing Rebecca Adlington win her gold and Michael Phelps his 10 was not the winning itself, but the beauty of seeing these phenomenal swimmers – and all the others in the pool with them – move underwater.
If I had my way, 90% of the swimming would be seen through the submerged cameras: of the many forms of athletic expression we see in the games, swimming is one of the most mesmeric to watch. From land, swimming can look splashy and hectic. Under the surface, we see how swimmers are truly at one with the element.
As we watch the Olympiads pulse through the water like watersnakes at the start, and then the synchronised grace with which their bodies roll and pull through the water as they complete the course, swimming looks like one of the most natural things in the world.
To many of the 12 million regular swimmers in this country (it’s the most popular participation sport in the country), it is. The basic relief from gravity, the elevation of mind and spirit that comes with bodily natural buoyancy; it’s hard not to feel the lift just watching the athletes. And how much more powerful would the experience be if they took swimming back outdoors?
This year they are: for the first time in decades the Olympics has a 10k open water race (August 20, 9pm Beijing time). In Ancient Rome, the powerfully built swimmers (nude, like all the sportsmen, so the crowds could better appreciate the mastery of the human body) swam in the rolling currents of the Tiber. In Athens, in 1896, they swam through heavy surf in the Bay of Zea. As recently as 1900, in France, the course involved navigating the currents as well as the medium of water in the Seine.
This for me is real sport and real swimming: the sportsmen not protected, like lab rats in a controlled experiment, from the elements, but showing their mastery of them – with wind whipping or calming waves on the day, currents ebbing and flowing unpredictably with recent rains.
It’s a triumph for the Olympics committee to move swimming back outdoors, but they’ve done so in a tepid way: the water is “outdoors” in that there is no roof, but to all other respects it’s a pool – a purpose-built rowing and canoeing park that has all the joy of a septic tank by a freeway.
Aside from the fact you can see the sky, it is missing almost all the joy and wonder of swimming in open water. How marvellous, when it comes to 2012, if the open water swim moved to the Serpentine in Hyde Park, rather than Docklands (both have been proposed). In the Serpentine, trees dip their leaves into the water, and swimmers share their swim with fish, swans, lilies, and the last rays of the day’s sun.
From here, perhaps, Olympic swimming could begin a stroke by stroke journey back into the wild: to a day when the swim involves all aspects of water – a triathlon of sea waves and tides, river currents and flow, and then mastery of cold in high lochs and tarns.
Then we’d see the true joy of swimming: not just the movement and grace of these superb swimmers, but a simultaneous celebration and understanding of both our, and the earth’s, nature.
Editor’s note: thanks to readers pointing out that there were no Olympics games in ancient Rome, the mistake has been corrected on 18/08/2008 at 13:07.
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