13th World Swimming Championships; Ontario Canada

Janet Evans of the USA and her astonishing straight arm recovery that worked for her. 

What a lucky lot of sports fans we are. So many sports covered so well on TV that there is not time in a normal busy life to watch everything you are interested in. So to cherry pick for the purposes of our household and sports that interest both of us it is tricky at this time of year with winter sports in full flower. 

And yet and yet….

The 13^th World Swimming Championships over 25 metres is being covered race by race on Eurosport. It is from Windsor, Ontario, in Canada. At the risk of sounding like the most obsessive nag-bag of all time I strongly advice anybody, that has the slightest desire to improve their own swimming, to watch at least some of these events. Obviously, if you are a swimmer or and triathlete, please make sure that you watch all the Freestyle events at least. I hope I didn’t hear you ask “WHY”.

 

Just in case you did respond in that way; the why is this. The under water shots are so helpful. They do show a huge amount of the swimming from the underwater point with a camera moving remotely along the floor of the pool so that you can see what the best swimmers in the world are doing that makes them so fast.

 

 

The big mistake beginners in our sport make when they start to think about getting their swim times down is standing at the end looking at what people’s arms are doing above the water. There is no propulsion forward from the recovery, no matter how text book you do it. All the recovery does is place your hand in a nice position to enter the water with that nice strong high elbow pushing it forward. All the speed and power comes from the technique you apply under the water. I back my point up by recommending you look at some old footage on you tube of Janet Evans who had what appeared to have the worst recovery in the history of competitive swimming but was so powerful through the water, and not slowed down by that eye widening straight arm recovery.

 

 

This does not mean that you don’t have to try to improve your stoke, you do, because without constantly checking yourself, it is easy to slip back into old habits and need I add that you are not Janet Evans. So when you are not blessed with a natural gift, perfect skeletal and muscular form, and all the other things you wish you had without trying; all you can do is work twenty times harder to improve and listen to your coach who is not on poolside for his or her health but they there because they are dedicated people who hope to give themselves and their skill and knowledge to their athletes.

 

 

Below I have lifted a piece out of Wikipedia about the remarkable Janet Evans of the USA

 

In 1987, she broke the world records in the 400-meter, 800-meter, and 1,500-meter freestyle distances. At the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, she won three individual gold medals, and she also earned the nickname "Miss Perpetual Motion."

 

 

 

 

 

 

In these Olympics, Evans set a new world record in the 400-meter freestyle event. This record stood for 18 years until France's Laure Manaudou broke it in May 2006.

Evans held the 1,500-meter freestyle record, set in March 1988, through June 2007, when it was broken by American Kate Ziegler with her time of 15:42.54.

Evans held the world record in the 800-meter freestyle, 8:16:22, that she set in August 1989, until it was broken by Rebecca Adlington of Britain in August 2008. Adlington set the new record with her time of 8:14.10 in winning the race at the 2008 Summer Olympics. Evans's 800-meter record was one of the longest-standing ones ever in swimming, and it went unbroken through four Olympic Games (1992–2004). Only the 100-meter freestyle swimming record set by the Dutch swimmer Willy den Ouden stood longer—from 1936 through 1956, during a period when international competition was interrupted by world war.