I get that it's a quirk of the sport's history, but it's funny and dumb that swimming awards medals and records for being the fastest at a slower stroke. It's like if track meets would have a 100m sprint, a 100m skip, and a 100m run-backwards.
If I could change things in the world, I wouldn't eliminate the extraneous strokes in swimming, but I would include additional competitions in all the track distances: backwards running, handstand walk, and one-legged hopping.
Olympics have different 'strokes' used between sprint, middle distance, long distance, hurdles, steeplechase and walking races - so there is some variety in the locomotion forms unlike your strawman.
The walking race is the only one where there are specific rules. The other races just happen to mostly favor a style. Sprint finishes in long distance races are common and legal
Oh, I didn't realize there were 100m, 200m, 400m, 800m, 1500m, etc walking races.
Is the variety in locomotion in the races you listed regulated by the governing body? Like, would you be DQ'd if you skipped the last 50m of a 100m dash?
For the record, I would fully endorse a "hurdles" equivalent in swimming: put an obstacle every 10m that the swimmers have to go under. Make the lanes zig-zag.
It is annoying that rules were added to the “freestyle” race, to preclude these new better underwater forms of swimming. Freestyle ought to mean you are free to pick any style.
The jumping events do have different "strokes": long jump, (standing) broad jump, triple jump, possibly-etc. As far as I know, there is no generalized "transport yourself X distance without touching the ground" event. (Although I could be wrong.)
My daughter’s school had a race day to wrap up their swimming lessons, and one of the events involved rolling from front to back every second stroke. It was funny to watch but not very practical.
Each of the major strokes has a distinct functional example: front crawl is fastest, breaststroke lets you sight directly in front of you with each breath (which is useful in general open water), and backstroke allows you to breath uninterrupted.
It makes sense to me to have different stroke events, although I wish there was a true freestyle that allowed for anything, including underwater.
Seeing backwards running races would be impressive. Seeing the fastest human runners is also very impressive, but it’s also less interesting in a sense because they’re doing exactly what our bodies evolved to be able to do. It is interesting to see that ability pushed to its natural limits, but I think it’s a bit more interesting to see people excel in things we didn’t evolve to do: like swimming or running backwards.
"Because the system does not have separate gears, but one (continuously shifting) gear and a separate 'reverse mode' (as opposed to reverse gear), the transmission works in reverse as well, giving it the side effect that one can drive backwards as fast as forwards. As a result, in the former Dutch annual backward driving world championship, the DAFs had to be put in a separate competition because no other car could keep up."
There's at least a couple of different runs, relay and hurdles are examples of variations on pure running. And if you squint, ice skating in a lot of ways is just a different style of running (with blades on the feet). Though you might then argue that rowing is a type of swimming with oars and a boat :)
> I get that it's a quirk of the sport's history, but it's funny and dumb that swimming awards medals and records for being the fastest at a slower stroke. It's like if track meets would have a 100m sprint, a 100m skip, and a 100m run-backwards.
This is arguably what race walking is, though it's over longer distances.
I get that it's a quirk of the sport's history, but it's funny and dumb that swimming awards medals and records for being the fastest at a slower stroke. It's like if track meets would have a 100m sprint, a 100m skip, and a 100m run-backwards.
If I could change things in the world, I wouldn't eliminate the extraneous strokes in swimming, but I would include additional competitions in all the track distances: backwards running, handstand walk, and one-legged hopping.