Butterfly Stroke - History

History

Australian Sydney Cavill (1881–1945), son of the "swimming professor" Frederick Cavill, was 220 yards amateur champion of Australia at the age of 16 and is credited as the originator of the butterfly stroke. He followed his famous brothers to America and coached notable swimmers at San Francisco's Olympic Club.

In 1933 Henry Myers swam a butterfly stroke in competition at the Brooklyn Central YMCA in late 1933. The butterfly style evolved from the breaststroke. David Armbruster, swimming coach at the University of Iowa, researched the breaststroke, especially considering the problem of drag due to the underwater recovery. In 1934 Armbruster refined a method to bring the arms forward over the water in a breaststroke. He called this style "butterfly". While the butterfly was difficult, it brought a great improvement in speed. One year later, in 1935, Jack Sieg, a swimmer also from the University of Iowa, developed a kick technique involving swimming on his side and beating his legs in unison, similar to a fish tail, and then modified the technique afterward to swim it face down. He called this style Dolphin fishtail kick. Armbruster and Sieg quickly found that combining these techniques created a very fast swimming style consisting of butterfly arms with two dolphin kicks per cycle. Richard Rhodes claims that Volney Wilson invented the 'Dolphin' after studying fish, and used it to win the 1938 US Olympic Trials, earning him a disqualification.

Currently, the entire style is referred to as butterfly, but sometimes still also called dolphin, especially when referring to the dolphin kick.

This new style was considerably faster than a regular breaststroke. Using this technique Jack Sieg swam 100 yards in 1:00.2. However, the dolphin fishtail kick violated the breaststroke rules set by FINA and was not allowed. Therefore, the butterfly arms with a breaststroke kick were used by a few swimmers in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin for the breaststroke competitions. In 1938, almost every breaststroke swimmer was using this butterfly style, yet this stroke was considered a variant of the breaststroke until 1952, when it was accepted by FINA as a separate style with its own set of rules. The 1956 Summer Olympics were the first Olympic games where the butterfly was swum as a separate competition, 100 m (women) and 200 m (men).