It seems disproportionate to other sport, except maybe gymnastics. Some popular sports don’t even have any representation, like cricket or bowling or squash. How did swimming get so much representation?
In: 17
It’s just the nature of the way the sport has evolved.
To start with, swimming is a racing sport, and as with most racing sports, this means that there will be different events for different lengths, allowing people to specialize in short vs. medium vs. long distances. In this regard, swimming is almost identical to track running events.
What gives swimming so many events compared to running, however, is the fact that there are essentially four different ways to swim: Freestyle, Backstroke, Breaststroke, and Butterfly. Because a swimmer can specialize in one (or all) of these, there are separate events for each, as well as an event called medley that combines all four.
By comparison, there arent four different ways to “run”, so swimming naturally ends up including more events.
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