The Chinese swimming team won the gold medal in a stunning comeback! Why is there no "dog paddle" in Olympic swimming competitions?
2024-08-06
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Recently, in the men's 4×100m medley relay final at the Paris Olympics,Xu Jiayu、Tan Haiyang、Sun Jiajun、Pan ZhanleThe Chinese team won the gold medal.August 4th, local time, champion Chinese team players Xu Jiayu, Qin Haiyang, Sun Jiajun, Pan Zhanle (from right to left) at the award ceremony. Xinhua News Agency reporter Du Yu photoIn the men's 4x100m medley relay final, the Chinese team sent Xu Jiayu (backstroke), Qin Haiyang (breaststroke), Sun Jiajun (butterfly) and Pan Zhanle (freestyle). The Chinese team was first in the first half and temporarily ranked third after the third leg.flying fish"Pan Zhanle swam a time of 45.92 seconds in each section, completing a stunning comeback. Finally,Chinese teamHe won the championship with a time of 3 minutes 27.46 seconds.Image source: Weibo screenshotThis is the first time that the Chinese swimming team has won an Olympic gold medal in this event.，Breaking the longest lead for the U.S. team since the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics 40 yearsA winning streak of ten Olympic Games in this event.In fact, if the United States had not boycotted the Moscow Olympics, Australia would have "picked up" a gold medal in 1980. Since the 1960 Rome Olympics, this is the first time in 64 years that American men have won four gold medals.✖The 100-meter medley relay lost to an opponent at the Olympics.Can you tell me what the four different swimming styles are? Remember, backstroke, breaststroke, butterfly, freestyle,Backstroke, breaststroke, butterfly stroke, freestyle.These are all four swimming styles used in modern competitive swimming competitions, and are also compulsory courses for children around the world who aspire to take up swimming.Only knows how to doggy paddle
Can I participate in the Olympics?
As a self-taught swimmer, some people may ask, can I participate in the Olympics if I only know how to doggy paddle? What ranking can I get?Don't mention it.Just knowing how to doggy paddle can help you participate in the Olympics.You can sign up for the freestyle event.But you may have noticed that neither Pan Zhanle, the best freestyle swimmer in the world, nor any of the other swimmers competing with him, adopted the "dog paddle" style. Is that really possible?Really. Freestyle（freestyle）As the name suggests, it is a swimming event with no restrictions on swimming styles, so you only need to meet some basic requirements, such as being out of the water 15 meters after the start, and not switching to other swimming styles during the entire swimming process, which is not considered a foul. So in freestyle competitions, you can swim breaststroke, backstroke, butterfly stroke or "dog paddle" and get valid scores. ButThe swimming style currently used by all athletes in freestyle competitions is actually the crawl（crawl）Why is the crawl stroke the most popular? We will talk about this later.When people talk seriously about swimming styles, they often overlook an original question: What is swimming?"Dog Paddle"? Anatomical Record, April 2020（The Anatomical Record）The journal published a study by three scientists from the Department of Biology at West Chester University in Virginia, USA, titled: "Dog Paddle, Swimming Stance Patterns of Different Dog Breeds"（The “dog paddle”：stereotypic swimming gait pattern in different dog breeds）This study is the first serious exploration of"Dog Paddle"this matter.In this study, scientists recruited 8 adult dogs of 6 different breeds, including a German Shepherd, two Labradors, two Newfoundlands, a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, a Jack Russell Terrier and a Yorkshire Terrier. Friends who are familiar with pet dogs may notice that the researchers' choice of "volunteer dogs" is very sophisticated, including large dogs such as Labradors and Newfoundlands weighing more than 100 kilograms, as well as small dogs such as Yorkshire Terriers that are only the size of a palm. Newfoundlands and Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retrievers were specially bred by humans to help us do water work, and they are particularly good at swimming; German Shepherds, Jack Russells and Yorkshire Terriers were not considered the factor of swimming during the breeding process.In the swimming pool, these eight dogs were carefully studied by scientists and obtained"Dog Paddle"The groundbreaking achievement in this field. First,"Dog Paddle"quiltIt is defined as a swimming posture in which the swimmer hangs his limbs under the body and slides backward in alternating arcs in a gait similar to walking on land, using the water resistance created by the limbs to generate propulsion while keeping the nostrils and eyes above the water.
In the end, the eight dogs achieved swimming speeds of 0.4-1.1 m/s."Dog Paddle"The speed difference is not as big as the size difference. 1.1m/s, 50 meters takes about 45 seconds. What will happen if such a result is compared with humans? If dogs can listen to the starting gun and swim in a straight line, they will probably leave their human friends half a pool away in the Olympic finals.According to the "National Swimming Exercise Level Standards" issued by the General Administration of Sports of my country,This result can almost reach the highest level of adult men: Level 1 Golden Dolphin (50m freestyle 40 seconds). Not to mention that these dogs may be participating in the elementary school group according to their actual age, which is definitely the highest amateur level.Why Swimming in the Olympics
No dog paddle？
I've said so much about dogs."Dog Paddle", human"Dog Paddle"What will happen?For humans, the "dog paddle" is a very natural swimming style. Newborns who have not received any swimming training will swim in a similar "dog paddle" posture.The dog paddle is not a very suitable swimming style. The problem is that our upright walking gait has shaped the head and neck anatomy that is completely different from that of other quadrupeds.When dogs enter the water and relax their bodies, their nostrils and eyes are high up on their heads, and the same movementHumans will find that their nostrils and eyes are in the water, so they have to raise their heads and paddle harder to keep their nostrils and eyes above the water.This also leads to"Dog Paddle"The posture makes it difficult to swim easily and for long distances.Upward, frog, butterfly, self
The history and characteristics of the four swimming styles
Humans have been living with water since their birth, and there are a lot of records about swimming in various civilizations. For example, about 10,000 years ago, some of our ancestors left their own swimming footprints on the wall of a cave located in the border area between Egypt and Libya today. Although it has a long history, swimming was a wild way for most of history until a Frenchman appeared.
In 1696, when the 36-year-old Emperor Kangxi was personally fighting against Galdan and the 53-year-old Isaac Newton had just taken over the Royal Mint in London, a book called "The Art of Swimming" appeared in France. This booklet was the first best-selling book on swimming instruction, and the author was Thevino（Melchisédec Thévenot）。Benjamin Franklin, who later became a founding father of the United States, once bought this book to practice swimming. Through "The Art of Swimming", we can get a glimpse of swimming techniques more than 300 years ago. At that time, the mainstream swimming style was breaststroke. Through the "retract, flip, kick, clamp" of the legs and the "row, hold, clamp, and extend" of the hands,Breaststroke is the ancestor of the four modern swimming styles. It is also the most technically complex and the slowest in average speed among the four swimming styles.August 4th local timeOn the 2nd day, China's second runner Qin Haiyang (breaststroke) was in the competition. Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Xia Yifang
In the history of the modern Olympics,At the 1904 Olympic Games in St. Louis, USA, swimming was officially divided into three strokes: breaststroke, freestyle and backstroke.After that, breaststroke techniques and standards have been changing. In the 1950s, many swimmers found that swimming underwater created much less resistance than swimming on the surface. Therefore, in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics men's 200-meter breaststroke competition, a Japanese athlete named Masaru Furukawa dived as soon as he started. He only took three breaths for the first three fifty meters, and he also swam half of the last fifty meters underwater. He won the gold medal.
This trend turned swimming competitions into breath-holding competitions, with many people fainting at the bottom of the pool and requiring lifeguards to come to work. As a result, the International Swimming Federation stipulated that the head should not be completely submerged in water, and this rule was not rewritten until 1987. Today, breaststrokers spend most of the period between breath changes gliding underwater. To learn the best breaststroke technique, you can watch the competition video of Chinese athlete Qin Haiyang.Although it is slow and technically complex, breaststroke has a strong presence in real life. Although breaststrokers swim with their heads down during competitions, you can keep your head up throughout the whole process, and with practice you can keep your head high out of the water. If you want to chat with friends while swimming, breaststroke is the best choice. If you need to swim with weight, breaststroke can also help you save energy to the maximum. If you need to save a drowning person, head-up breaststroke is the only swimming style that allows you to maintain visual contact with the person being rescued.At present, both at home and abroad,Most swimming training institutions use breaststroke as the entry-level swimming style.The main reason is that it can keep breathing smoother to the greatest extent possible.
The main reason that prevents people from learning the crawl stroke is that its breathing technique is difficult to master.After all, instinctively, we want to keep our mouths and noses above water as much as possible when we are in water.In the 1840s, the predecessor of the crawl stroke appeared in Europe, which is the sidestroke. This swimming style makes people look a bit like a flatfish, with the body lying on the water on its side, the head mostly above the water, and the legs no longer tucked in and kicked out like the breaststroke, but scissor legs, with the arms assisting in paddling the water behind and below the body, which looks a bit like running in the water while lying on one's side. This swimming style has been popular for more than a hundred years. Today, although the sidestroke has disappeared in competitive swimming pools, it is still a very practical swimming technique. Lifeguards use the sidestroke when towing drowning people.The key figures who transformed the sidestroke into the crawl stroke were actually two Native Americans.1844, "Flying Gull"（Flying Gull）and "Tobacco"（Tobacco）Crossing the Atlantic to London, this is not a flower name, this is two Anishinaabe people（Anishinaabe）They came to London to participate in a swimming competition. In the London swimming pool, what amazed Europeans was not their appearance, but their swimming style - arms that swung like windmills and legs that kept kicking down."tobacco"This left the Europeans, who only knew how to do breaststroke and sidestroke, to compete for third place.After several evolutions, the Indian crawl eventually became the modern crawl. It has the smallest cross-sectional area of the body, the smallest fluctuation of the center of gravity, and the highest efficiency in holding water, pushing water and kicking legs. In freestyle competitions where there is no limit on swimming styles, no one is willing to use other swimming styles.That’s why freestyle has become synonymous with crawl.Local time August4th,Chinese team player Pan Zhanle (Freestyle, right) sprinting in the final stage. Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Xia Yifang
If you do the crawl stroke in reverse, it's pretty much the backstroke.The backstroke was first included in the modern Olympics one year earlier than the breaststroke, at the first Paris Olympics in 1900. The technique at that time was more like the "reverse breaststroke" that swimmers use to relax today. Soon, the backstroke evolved into a reverse freestyle, propelled by the paddle and kick.Backstroke is the only one of the four modern swimming styles that starts in water.The starter will blow a long whistle, and the athletes will jump into the water, grab the starting device on the diving platform and start.This is also the reason why the first leg of the medley relay is always backstroke.In the individual medley competition, which also requires four swimming strokes, the order of the four events becomes butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, freestyle, and freestyle.。On August 4, local time, Chinese team player Xu Jiayu (backstroke) was in the competition. Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Wang YuguoWhen amateurs swim backstroke, the biggest worry is that they can't see the direction ahead and hit their heads on the edge of the pool at the end. Therefore, professional swimming pools will hang a row of small flags five meters away from the starting and ending points. When you see the flags, you only need to paddle a few strokes to reach the edge. This is something that should be engraved in your mind. Although the reverse force backstroke is not a mainstream swimming style in swimming pools, if you can only choose one swimming style to learn, it must be the backstroke.If you don't pursue speed, backstroke is the most energy-saving swimming style and is an essential skill for self-rescue from drowning.
The last of the four swimming styles is the butterfly stroke.In the 1930s, swimmers discovered when practicing breaststroke that if they transferred the "arm moving" action from underwater to above the water surface, their swimming speed would increase. After all, the resistance of air is only one seven hundredth of the resistance of water. If it cannot be used to generate power, it is better not to happen in the water.Local time AugustOn the 4th, Chinese team player SunJiajun (butterfly stroke)During the competition. Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Wang Yuguo
In this way, after holding the water, the swimming posture of the hands turning out of the water from the side and back of the body to the front of the body appears. The arm movement is flying, while the leg movement is still the breaststroke.When this movement appeared in the breaststroke competition, the judges were confused. Is a frog with wings still a frog?While judges were still arguing over the definition of breaststroke, the key step to transforming from frog to butterfly appeared. In the mid-1930s, an American swimming coach invented the dolphin kick, which changed the cross-kick of the crawl stroke to a synchronous force of the left and right legs.This dolphin kick and the water-holding posture of moving the arms in the air are particularly compatible, and when combined together they become the butterfly stroke.In 1952, the then International Swimming Federation recognized the butterfly stroke as a new swimming style.The butterfly kick, also known as the dolphin kick, is the most important training content in modern swimming training and the best known way for humans to propel themselves underwater. The two-handed air recovery that makes the butterfly stroke the butterfly stroke is the most flashy technique in the swimming world. Its only practical value is to make you the focus in the pool.Author: Rutan Popular Science Creator
Review丨Ma Yong, Professor of Wuhan Institute of Physical Education
Planning丨Zhong Yanping
Editor:Zhong Yanping
Proofread by Xu Lailinlin
The cover image and the images in this article are from the copyright library
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