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Swimming

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Swimming is one of the glamour sports of the Olympic Games and nowhere is this more true than in Australia.

Some of the most famous sporting names in the nation's history are swimmers.

Murray Rose, Andrew "Boy" Charlton, Fanny Durack, Shane Gould and John Konrads set the standard now.

That standard was met, perhaps even exceeded, by recent heroes like Kieren Perkins, Susie O'Neill, Michael Klim, and the amazing Ian Thorpe - the greatest Olympian in Australia's history.

Now today's superstars - the likes of Libby Trickett, Leisel Jones, Grant Hackett, Stephanie Rice and Eamon Sullivan - have their sights firmly set on Beijing's water cube to raise the bar even further.

Those great female swimmers will be following the bow wave of Dawn Fraser, the female swimmer of the century and one of the greatest sporting talents Australia has ever produced.

In a career spanning the 1956, '60 and '64 Games, Fraser set 39 world records.

In all three Games campaigns she won the 100m freestyle gold, becoming the first swimmer in Olympic history to win the same event at three successive Games.

Remarkably, her career could have been even more spectacular if she had not been banned from competition for a decade after her part in the now infamous flag souveniring incident at the Tokyo Games in 1964.

Fraser's first Olympic Games was the first held in Australia, in Melbourne in 1956, and at that time Australia ruled the pool.

Since then, the United States has been by far the most dominant swimming nation.

At the 1968 Games, the Americans won more medals than every other nation combined.

But Australia has closed the gap since then, and now regularly pushes the US to the brink. The story is likely to be the same in Beijing.

It seems reasonable to assume that humans have always swum.

There is evidence that American Indians swam using a stroke similar to modern-day freestyle.

Europeans were slow to pick up the trend. Overarm swimming did not become popular until the late 1800s with the development of the Trudgen, named for the English coach who developed it.

A variation of the Trudgen, which involved swimming on the left side and using a powerful scissor kick, was used by Australian Freddie Lane to win the 200m event at the Paris Games in 1900.

At the turn of the century, an Australian-based Englishman Fred Cavill began teaching the overarm stroke, allying it to a flutter kick similar to that used in freestyle today.

Cavill's stroke became known as the Australian Crawl and is still the basis for today's freestyle.

Swimming was part of the first Olympic Games of the modern era.

Portrayed as an event for sailors, competitors in the 1896 Athens Games were taken into the Mediterranean by boat and plunged overboard, swimming to the shore.

Backstroke made its debut in 1900 and breaststroke was added in 1908. Women's swimming events made their debut in 1916.

Butterfly, which began as a mutant form of breaststroke, was only added to the program in 1956.

A loophole in the breaststroke rules saw swimmers prior to '56 lifting their arms out of the water during breaststroke races, giving them an advantage over those practising the traditional stroke.

Butterfly was created as a result.

By the time the butterfly was added to the Olympic program, a number of other events had disappeared.

These included the 200m obstacle race, also won by Lane in Paris in 1900.

This involved a course along the river Seine which was lined with a string of rowing boats in each lane.

Competitors had to swim to the first boat, clamber into it, dive back in and swim under the next boat, then clamber into the third, and so on.

Underwater swimming and the plunge, an event which involved diving into the water and staying under the surface for as long as possible, also disappeared forever in the early part of the century.

Venues too have changed markedly. Races in the early years of the modern Olympics were held in the Mediterranean, the Seine and a duckpond (literally) in London.

By the Stockholm Games of 1912, events were held in a pool, but there were no lane ropes and Australian competitor Mina Wylie recalled later that the swimmers could not see the bottom of the pool.

A newspaper report from the Stockholm Games records that Wylie's famous team-mate Fanny Durack won the women's 100 metres final, despite at one point running into the side of the pool.

It's all a far cry from the state of the art water cube, one of the most amazing Olympic pools ever seen.

Despite its humble beginnings, swimming has seen some of the greatest performances in Olympic history.

Foremost among them was the effort of American Mark Spitz at the 1972 Games in Munich.

Spitz won an amazing seven gold medals, winning all four individual and three relay events he entered.

But triumph for Spitz came after disappointment. Before the 1968 Games in Mexico Spitz declared that he would win six gold medals. Instead he came home with just two, both for relays. His effort in Munich was also matched by that of Kristin Otto 16 years later in Seoul.

Otto, then a 22-year-old from the German Democratic Republic, entered six events and won them all - four as an individual and two in relay teams.

Australians

Without doubt, swimming has been Australia's most successful Olympic sport.

Of the 78 Olympic gold medals Australia has won, 40 of them have been won in the pool.

Australia's most decorated Olympic athletes have been swimmers. Both Dawn Fraser and Murray Rose won four gold medals. But they were eclipsed by Ian Thorpe in Athens when he won his fifth career gold medal to become Australia's most prolific Olympian.

Fraser also won four silver medals in her 12 year Olympic career while Rose won a silver and a bronze.

While Fraser excelled in winning the 100m freestyle at three successive Olympics, Shane Gould's star burned almost as brightly, but far more briefly.

She was a child star, winning three gold medals, a silver and a bronze - all of them, unlike Rose and Fraser, coming in individual events - at the 1972 Games in Munich.

But while this quartet have won between them 16 of the country's 52 swimming gold medals, others have also contributed to Australia's success.

Freddie Lane kicked things off with his two golds in Paris in 1900.

Swimmers like Frank Beaurepaire, who won six medals (none of them gold) over 16 years, helped establish Australia's reputation as a swimming power.

Boy Charlton, Fanny Durack, Lorraine Crapp, John and Ilsa Konrads, Michael Wenden and, more recently, Kieren Perkins, Michael Klim, Petria Thomas and Susie O'Neill have also played their parts.