23-Apr-2012
THE FEEL OF WATER
Aamir Bilal
The on going torrential rains across the country has left thousands countrymen homeless, many have lost their lives and lives of their loved ones. This reminds me of Seri Lankan tsunami where millions lost their lives because they were naive swimmers. Swimming is a natural act and experiments have shown that even the newborn babies swim if left free in water. Realizing the importance of this basic skill the Seri Lankan government launched a huge program of swimming for the people living along the costal belt of the country so that the loss of precious lives can be minimized in any such future eventuality.
Swimming in turbulent open water is a challenging task, however we are unaware of the fact that open water swimming is now part of Olympic games, and race of over 10 Km were contested for the first time at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the people from all age groups in both urban and rural areas of the country come to open water spaces including canals, lakes and rivers to beat the scorching heat and have fun and feel of the cold running water.
Archaeologists know that humans developed watercraft 40,000 years ago and Romans built first swimming pools, however they were very small in size and the first ever recorded swimming champion in the history “Cicero” complained that he needed a wider pool to avoid hurting his hands against the wall.
More surprisingly the history shows that Pakistan is the birth place of first proper swimming pool in the world which was 39 feet long and 23 feet wide in Mohenjo-Dario, which served a religious function through a form of synchronized swimming. Despite the stunning fact that Pakistan is the birth place of synchronized swimming, one hardly finds appropriate public swimming pools in the country, where scientific training can be imparted to the young swimmers under the watchful eyes of trained coaches.
Back in time, to the dawn of history, primitive people used the dog paddle, a stroke that naturally involves the principle of continuous propulsion. Around 17th century, European swimmers started to copy the swimming movement of the frog, and from this came the stop start action of the breaststroke, the first formal type of swimming in Western culture.
The art of swimming passed through a long curve of evolution. The North American Indians, Australians, Japanese and the British contributed immensely in the development of different swimming strokes and styles. However the development of Crawl stroke revolutionized swimming in the year 1900. The Japanese improved upon the basic crawl and introduced a method that eminently suited to their shorter stature, flexible bodies and short arms. This new style was the result of filming in great detail the styles of Johnny Weissmuller, the 1928 Olympic 100 meter champion and Arne Borg of Sweden, the 1928 Olympic 1,500 meter champion.
Harry Hebner who made his international debut in 1908 as a 17 year old member of Olympic team invented the backstroke but it was Adolph Kiefer a Chicago school boy who in 1953 swam 100 meter backstroke in 57.6 seconds with an improved style that was later popularized as “Kiefer style”.
The credit of developing the breaststroke goes to Frank Sachs in 1912 and Henry Myers of the Brooklyn Dragon swim club is generally credited with developing the butterfly stroke in 1933 but he had to wait till 1956 Melbourne Olympics, when butterfly was finally included as a separate swimming event.
While we in Pakistan were consuming our energies on the politics of swimming, the sports scientists and top coaches around the world worked relentlessly to bring improvements in swimming styles and enhance speed and endurance of the swimmers. Detailed work was carried out on the interaction of lift and drags forces, lift coefficient and drag coefficient, the angle of attack, development of bio-kinetic swim bench, and transitional phases of swimming strokes. The scientists also worked on the understanding of hydrodynamics, the velocity of the flow, the flow patterns, viscosity and the role of airfoils in creating lifts.
Along with scientific research came the training which was evolved from the primitive methods of Charles Steedman to the modern training programs of today. Different training methodologies were developed that included track training, interval training, steady state training, tempo training, endurance training and use of controlled workloads.
Come what ever may be the training methodology the point to remember for serious minded swimmers is that quality swimming involves long rest periods, which permit high speed activity, the intensity of which limits the duration of the activity. Where as, quantity swimming involves short rest periods, which permits only sub-maximal speeds to be maintained. The reduced speed enables the activity to be prolonged, thereby enhancing development of endurance.
The evolution of strokes, training methodologies and scientific developments in swimming has put a wide gap between our “department oriented” national swimmers and professional swimmers of the modern world. Recently a seven judges committee based on the virtues of dominance, quality of world records, Olympic and other world titles, and the impact of the swimmer on the wider society nominated top twenty four male and female swimmers of the twentieth century.
In the modern day swimming Mark Spitz of USA with 172 points heads the men’s table where as Dawn Fraser of Australia with 171 points leads the female section. The other dominant male swimmers include great swimmers like Johnny Weissmuller (USA), Matt Biondi (USA) and Murray Rose of Australia. Amongst the female the great names of 20th century include Janet Evans of USA, Tracy Caulkins (USA), Shane Gould of Australia and Debbhie Meyer of USA.
Swimming forms part of the mother sport along with athletics and gymnastics. Pakistan has its problems with organized swimming because it requires state of the art swimming pools. But what happened in Serpentine River in August 1838 with the support of National Swimming Society provides a ray of hope to our pathetic swimming system, as it was the beginning of organized open water swimming that does not require the facility of swimming pool.
In the beginning of 19th century, the public swimming pools as we know them today did not exist. Many of the leading schools in England encouraged their pupils to learn to swim. Races in a nearby river, canal or pond became part of the school sports curriculum. The industrial revolution in Europe turned the trends and fast growing population caused great congestion and early century epidemics of cholera with heavy mortality often swept through cities and towns.
In 1834, barrister Edwin Chadwick emphasized the provision of increased water supplies and improved sanitation. In 1842, the British Swimming Society presented a petition signed by 322 persons in favor of bathing spaces. The petition stated that over 2,000 people drowned annually, 350 in London alone, mainly attributable to the neglect of the art of swimming.
How many people drown in Pakistan every year in the flooding season, because they don’t know how to swim is a question that remains unanswered because of non availability of authentic data? This year according to Red Cross estimate 1600 people have drowned and 2.5 million have been affected due to inundation of thousands of villages. Yet swimming in canals, rivers and open sea can be witnessed at many places in the country.
Open water swimming is very different and challenging from swimming in a pool. Long distance open water swimming requires extraordinary physical and mental toughness. Very few sports are as precise as swimming. Cyclists can blame the wind, runners the terrain and team sports the referee. Swimming, on the other hand, has exact distances and water is, well, constant.
Pakistan may be short of public swimming pools but there is no dearth of open swimming spaces, starting from Attaabad Lake in North where peripheral nerve conduction may fall below 15ms for every ten degree centigrade, and muscle power output falls 3% for every one degree centigrade fall in muscle temperature, thus reinforcing the need for maintenance of power output to reduce the deleterious impact of extreme cold on performance, to the extents of cozy warm waters of vast Indian Ocean, largest canal system of the world and sufficient rivers.
We were lucky that “Phet” spared Karachi but inundated the coastal areas of Badin and Thatta, followed by the ongoing monsoon rains drowning a large number of innocent who were unaware of swimming. This brings us to the burning question of the construction of solitary swimming pool at Nawabshah with the cost of Rs 7 Million to help in improving the swimming standards in the country? Would it be prudent to invest such huge amount in Nawabshah that has never produced a swimmer of international repute or we need to spend the same amount in holding organized swimming in the open water spaces across the country.
Mr Cornel Marculescus the Executive Director of FINA in Switzerland recognizes Mr Kamran Lashari and panel of his office bearers as the bona-fied Pakistan Swimming Federation (PSF). Mr Lashari has done some good development work in Islamabad as Chairman CDA; the country would have saluted him, had he made few public swimming pools in the capital city along with parks and play areas or managed few swimming competitions in the Rawal Lake to hunt the hidden swimming talent in the capital city.
I am sure that Pakistan has ample of swimming talent amongst both male and female. Despite the shortage of public swimming pools and clean chlorinated water, if given an opportunity and properly organized by PSF, there is no reason why future swimming champions can’t be produced in the category of open swimming and may precious lives can be saved from drowning in future monsoon floods in the country.
Aamir Bilal
Qualified Coach IOC
03 August 2010
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