Swimming

I prefer to speak about swimming. When I was 5, I went on swimming 2 years. I haven't been in any competition but for me I had had great successes. Now I can swim in swimming pool, in sea or ocean. Many people in nowadays avoid to spend their holidays in coastal areas, because they can't swim, or afraid of it. But to go to swim, especially in younger age give you confidence, freedom, and the most important thing - slim and beautiful figure. So swim is important and needful for life.

Now I want to tell about competitions and swim styles.
Swimming is an event at the Summer Olympic Games, where male and female athletes compete in 16 of the recognized events each. Olympic events are held in a 50-meter pool, called a long course pool.
World Championship pools must be fifty metres long and twenty-five metres wide, with ten lanes labelled zero to nine (zero and nine are usually left empty in semi-finals and finals), the lanes must be at least 2.5 metres wide.

There are forty officially recognized individual swimming events in the pool; however the International Olympic Committee only recognizes 32 of them. The international governing body for competitive swimming is the Fédération Internationale de Natation ("International Swimming Federation"), better known as FINA.


In open water swimming, where the events are swum in a body of open water (lake or sea), there are also 5 km, 10 km and 25 km events for men and women. However, only the 10 km event is included in the Olympic schedule, again for both men and women. Open-water competitions are typically separate to other swimming competitions with the exception of the World Championships and the Olympics.

Swim style

In competitive swimming, four major styles have been established. These have been relatively stable over the last 30–40 years with minor improvements. The four main strokes in swimming are:

Butterfly (fly)
Backstroke (back)
Breaststroke (breast)
Freestyle (free)

Events in competition may have only one of these styles except in the case of the individual medley, or IM, which consists of all four. In this latter event, swimmers swim equal distances of butterfly, then backstroke, breaststroke, and finally, freestyle. In Olympic competition, this event (called the "IM") is swam in these distances - 200 or 400 meters. Some competition also swims the 100 yard or meter IM - particularly, for younger swimmers (typically under 14 years) involved in club swimming, or masters swimming (over 18).

Source 1.