Aquatics

WATER SPORTS
First appearance in the Central American and Caribbean Games: 1926

Swimming: before attaining its current Olympic format, with competitions in 50m pools with eight lanes (where qualifying rounds, semifinals and finals are held), individual and relay competitions in freestyle, breaststroke, backstroke, and butterfly stroke, covering distances between 50m and 1,500m, swimming had extremely varied competitions. Greek mythology is full of references to swimming, but surely it was a part of man’s life since prehistoric times. The 19th Century is the most probable setting for the start of the practice of swimming as a sport, with the emergence of competitions in which athletes practiced a style similar to the breaststroke.

The crawl: used in freestyle, was an adaptation of the way South American Indians swam. In the Olympic Games, until the year of 1908 when the International Swimming Federation (FINA) was created and the Games were held in London, England, swimming competitions had already been held in the sea, in rivers, and in lakes, and there were also underwater swimming competitions, swimming with obstacles, and plunge for distance.

Synchronized Swimming: before becoming an Olympic event, synchronized swimming literally belonged to cinema. Starting with the acrobatic water shows performed in the United States at the beginning of the 20th Century by swimmer Annette Kellerman, the sport was developed by Katherine Curtis, who associated figures in water created by swimmer’s bodies accompanied by music, and reached the musicals of the MGM studios, starring Esther Williams in the 1940s and 50s. After a performance by Katherine Curtis’ students in the Century of Progress World Fair in Chicago in 1933 and 1934, the Olympic swimmer Norman Ross coined the phrase “synchronized swimming”. Its current format was developed in that same period by the U.S. student Frank Havlicek. It is one of the few sports limited solely to women, who compete solo, in pairs or teams of eight, with obligatory motions and freestyle routines, and they are judged as to technique and creativity. Unlike other water sports, it was recently held for the first time in the Pan American Games in 1955.

Water Polo: was developed in parallel in North America and Europe in the 19th Century. Currently, it bears the American name, but its form is more influenced by its European origins. According to the rules developed by North American Harold Reeder, players played floating on barrels, as if they were horses, and hit the ball with sticks like in polo. In England, the sport arose as an aquatic version of rugby and evolved in a direction similar to soccer, with two teams of seven players (one as a goalie) who compete against each other in a pool, trying to get possession of the ball to score a goal in the opponent’s goalpost, without touching the ground with their feet or the edge of the pool with their hands during four seven-minute quarters.

Diving: the history of this sport says a lot about it. Its origins date back to the 17th Century when Swedish and German gymnasts started practicing acrobatics jumping on a surface that would cause the least physical damage in the event of a fall: water. That is what diving consists of: doing acrobatics in the air, jumping from 10m platforms or 3m springboard and entering the water in a smooth and elegant manner. In the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games in Australia, a new category was introduced, synchronized dives, in which pairs of men and women dive simultaneously and are judged not only on technical quality, style, and difficulty of the dive, but also on the synchronization of the two athletes.

Competition Itinerary

Competition Itinerary

Disciplines

Gender

July-August 2010