The Deceptive Calm of Olympic Open-Water Swimming – The New Yorker

Twenty-six women raced a ten-kilometre course this morning in the choppy aquamarine waters off Copacabana Beach, completing the last of the Olympic women’s swimming events, and the only one not held in a pool. (The men will follow tomorrow.) It was a fitting conclusion to the past week’s exhilarating and historic indoor aquatic performances. Although marathon swimming, as the contest is known, only became an Olympic event in 2008, at the Beijing Games, it nods to the sport’s ancient origins more than anything that happens now in a pool. It is also, arguably, much harder. Pool swimming is a spectacle of perfection, with each competitor alone in a lane, exhibiting peak mastery of one of the sport’s four strokes—backstroke, breaststroke, butterfly, or freestyle. Open-water swimming is cruder, less elegant, more primal. The women racing today, for roughly two hours, had to contend physically and psychologically not only with the elements—a strong opposing current, wind chop on the surface, a blazing sun, water high in bacteria—but also with one another, ceaselessly, right up to the last hundredth of a second.

Open-water swimming tends to conjure up images of impassioned loners silently stroking across the sea, in search of glory or transcendence. (Or love, as in Ovid’s story of Leander, who swam across the Hellespont each night to see Hero, guided by the torch lighting her tower.) But marathon swimming is not so much meditative as combative. In stunning aerial shots of Copacabana this morning, a flotilla of support dinghies and kayaks surrounded what resembled a white rip in the bay’s shifting navy fabric, like the wake following an invisible ship. Yet, when the camera switched to a surface-level closeup, it revealed a packed scrum of capped-and-goggled heads and windmilling, criss-crossing arms amid a boiling whitewater broth. Under the surface, swimmers were grabbing and holding one another’s legs, arms, and bathing suits. They were continually tapping the feet of whomever they were following, just to mess with that person’s head. While intentionally touching another swimmer is grounds for disqualification—as is any behavior that a referee (following in a support vessel) deems “unsporting”—it’s hard for officials to see what’s happening. The British swimmer Keri-Anne Payne sought judo lessons from two fellow-Olympians to prepare for today’s race. (She placed seventh.)

In the marathon, competitors use the front crawl—what swimmers typically call freestyle. Freestyle is the fastest stroke, and one that people have used to move through water quickly for millennia. In London’s British Museum, bas-reliefs probably dating from 880 B.C. show fugitives swimming to a fortress and the Assyrian army crossing a river. In both, people are depicted swimming on their stomachs, with one arm in the air, elbow loose, palm downward, ready to catch water. The other arm, unseen, is under the surface, pulling water backward as it propels the body forward. The legs are straight, scissor kicking. While this kick, known also as a flutter kick, is now recognized to have little propulsive value, it is important for balancing the body.

According to the official rules of the Fédération Internationale de Natation, swimming’s governing body, there are no front-crawl events, only freestyle events, in which “freestyle” means exactly what it says. Swimmers can use any style they want, as long as some part of their body breaks the surface of the water throughout the race. In the marathon this morning, technically a freestyle event, some swimmers occasionally rotated into backstroke, which is slower but allows for easier breathing. (When doing freestyle in the ocean, you have to frequently lift your head high enough in order to breathe without swallowing water.) In pool events, no one ever swims anything but front crawl, which is why it became synonymous with freestyle. Last week, Katie Ledecky demonstrated a freestyle superior to any woman’s in history, and collected four gold medals for the United States. In the eight hundred metres, her best event, she broke her own world record and beat the second finisher by more than eleven seconds—an eternity in this sport. Hypothetically, according to one of the strangest official freestyle rules, if Ledecky had gotten bored with being so far ahead of her competitors and wanted to give her fans a nail-biting race on her last lap, she could have dived to the pool bottom and meditated there for a moment before popping back up. Specifically, FINA writes that “standing on the bottom during freestyle events or during the freestyle portion of medley events shall not disqualify a swimmer, but he shall not walk.”

To the uneducated eye, Ledecky’s freestyle might look similar to that of her competitors, but it’s not. She has a loping style, meaning she takes a longer stroke with one arm, her left, than the other—the rhythm is iambic pentameter—and only breathes to the right. The reason for this imbalance? Breathing on both sides, which is what many swimmers used to do, is now thought to create too much lateral sway, whereas breathing on only one side maintains a consistent angle to the swimmer’s forward motion. As Michael Sokolove put it in his recent Times profile of Ledecky, “She glides on one side just an instant longer, like a sailboat keeling.” While the style is well-known among her competitors, and now common among men, it might also be familiar to any non-Olympians who were paying close attention last week, since its best practitioner is Michael Phelps.

I wonder how Ledecky would have held up in today’s marathon, which is more than ten times longer than her longest pool event. The highly calibrated power and pace that send her shooting ahead of the other swimmers would be disrupted by the waves, currents, and human melee. Yet, if she were able to sprint ahead of the frothy mob, which she very likely could, considering her ability to accelerate over long distances, she would do well. A Dutch twenty-two-year-old named Sharon van Rouwendaal used this strategy, breaking past the other swimmers around the eighth kilometre, and then maintaining her substantial lead until she slapped the touch pad for gold. (Van Rouwendaal had been favored to win gold at the European Aquatics Championships, in July, too, but took a wrong turn at a buoy near the finish and drifted off course.)