it seems a little arbitrary having medals for both freestyle and also backstroke, butterfly, etc. Like, in track and field there’s not a 100m “running backwards” event. Why are there so many medals for swimming? Who decided it was that important relative to other forms of physical endeavor?
It also seems awkward in comparison to olympic weightlifting, which has TWO different lifts as part of a single event. I understand that they already bracket it by weight classes, but why not break it into a medal for the clean-and-jerk and another for the snatch? Or alternatively, add other events that test strength and precision?
I’m okay if the answer is just “that’s how it’s always been” and general path-dependence, but it seems a bit odd.
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Former competitive swimmer here – I never made it beyond state but trained with folks who were nationally ranked. Though all swimming events look similar to an outsider the different strokes (backstroke, breaststroke, butterfly, freestyle) and different distances require different training. There are some great butterfly competitors who are also, say, great backstroke competitors, but that means that person has trained hard to do two different physical activities, not that they’re intuitively easy for a competitor to switch between.
To use your weightlifting example, I don’t know why they don’t isolate muscle groups and have different events for, say, dumbbell curls vs dumbbell presses, but the swimming events they have make sense the same way track and field events do.
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