Know A Sport Series : "Swimming"

To start with I am a Swimmer by 'Soul'. I've represented many teams at different levels of competitions and brought out glory for my team for many years of my swimmer phase. Was not able to continue with it for many 'non-understandable' reasons though but i never miss a chance to swim few laps whenever i get any opportunity.

So did you wondered what did i meant with 'Laps'? Let me introduce you to basics of swimming as a sport.

Swimming

Equipments:

1. Swimming Costume/Trunk (for boys)

2. Swimming cap

3. Eye goggles

(I'd be mentioning Starting block later because swimmer do not need the block to equip.)

Strokes: There are four basic styles of swimming which are called strokes.

1. Forward stroke/ Crawl Stroke

(generally referred to as free style)

2. Back Stroke

3. Breast Stroke

4. Butterfly

Swimming Pool: Like every sport has specific play ground swimming is done in swimming pools.

1. The length of a standard Swimming pool for competition is 50 Mts.

2. There are 7 to 12 lanes and every swimmer/competitor is assigned one lane.

3. Starting Block: every lane has its own starting block which is used to start/or take off or specifically dive into the pool.

(in the picture you can see lanes divided by red+yellow+blue lines and the starting blocks right before the swimmers.)

Events:

Based on distances+strokes there are multiple events in every competition.

which are:

50 mts. freestyle/back stroke/breast stroke/butterfly

100 mts. freestyle/back stroke/breast stroke/butterfly

200 mts. freestyle/back stroke/breast stroke/butterfly

400 mts. freestyle/back stroke/breast stroke/butterfly

Also, there are these 3 events.

800 mts. free style (this is where the name free style was derived for crawl stroke. Actually in this event swimmer needs to swim 800 mts. in any stroke but his first and last 100 mts. (i.e. round should be in crawl stroke.)

4xD Medley relay (here D=an x amount of distance. in this the swimmer/team of 4 swimmers perform D mts. of every stroke.)

4xD Relay (here team of 4 swimmers perform D mts of any one stroke.)

Decision of winner:

1.There are semifinals (known as heats)where 7-12 (depending how many lanes are available) fastest swimmers are listed And finals winner is decided on the basis of timing.

2. Gold, Silver and Bronze Medals are awarded to the 1st, 2nd and 3rd winner respectively.

Some Random glossary:

1.Laps: Rounds in a pool

2.Flip/or turn: as turn word itself clarifies between two laps when the swimmer takes a turn to go back to point A.

3.Dive: The start taking technique where fingers of hands are first to enter water followed by hand,head, shoulders, waist and legs.

*there are officials assigned for each lane who notes the timing of their concerned swimmer.