My favorite sport is swimming.He like the fact that swimming has an unusually long history. Archaeological finds indicate that the ability to swim was seen as vitally important in Ancient Egypt, Ancient India, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome. Swimming was used as a means of active recreation, and as a sanitary procedure, and in a variety of applications, including the economic activities on the water, overcoming all kinds of water hazards both in peacetime and during hostilities.
Scholars date to the third Millennium BC, the most ancient of found images of people floating ways, something like swimming the front crawl and breaststroke - when used to compare modern terminology. Textbook famous words of the Greek public figure of Solon, who, describing an ignorant man, said that he"... can neither swim nor read. However, although in Ancient Greece and were held swimming competitions in the program of competitions of the ancient Greek Olympic games it was not included.
Competitive swimming as a sport began to develop at the turn of XV-XVI century A. D. One of the examples can serve as competition swimmers, held in 1515 in Venice. Regular swimming competition began in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1837, in England, created the world's first Association of Amateur competitive swimming. In 1889 in Budapest hosted the first international swimming competition, which was attended by athletes from Austria, Hungary, Germany and Sweden, and in 1890 was held the first European championship in this sport.
In the late nineteenth century , when the construction of the artificial pools, competitive swimming became popular in various countries around the world. A reflection of this was the inclusion of swimming competitions in the program of the first modern Olympic games, held in 1896 in Athens and since then this sport is invariably included in the program of all the Games of Olympiads.
The participants of the first Olympic events sailed mainly by the way the brass and the way on the side without the removal of the hands from the water. The breaststroke is perhaps the oldest of the current styles of swimming: it has its origin since the last quarter of the eighteenth century , and its name, in French, the word "brass" means "swing" describes the main features of this style include swimming simultaneous broad strokes. Swimming on the side without the removal of the hand from the water is as solid age. Then it was used a variant of this voyage, borrowed by the British, the Indians, bringing one hand over the water. "over arm" that has provided a noticeable increase in speed. In the 70-ies of the XIX century there appeared the so-called "Trajan-style", named after the Englishman, which borrowed this style of swimming during your stay in South America: athlete swimming on his chest, keeping your head above water, hands alternately perform the strokes and brought forward over the water surface, and legs during the stroke of one of the arms perform the movement "scissors".
In the beginning of XX century there is a new swimming style, was the most perfect and fastest of the known methods of navigation, outwardly resembling the motion of a crawling man, and therefore called "the crawl" is a word in English means "to creep". For the first time this style of swimming showed Allen Wickham, who was born in the Solomon Islands in the Pacific ocean and learned to swim at local residents. In the future, the initial technique of swimming crawl, freestyle - the so-called double-stressed crawl, in which the stroke of each hand has one movement of the foot - repeatedly improved.