Swimming

Speed, strength and stamina will be key for athletes in the Swimming competition at the London 2012 Games, which features no fewer than 34 medal events.

Key facts

Venue: Aquatics Centre – Olympic Park (pool events); Hyde Park (Marathon Swimming 10km)
Dates: Saturday 28 July – Saturday 4 August (Aquatics Centre); Thursday 9 – Friday 10 August (Hyde Park)
Medal events: 34
Athletes: 950

Evidence of people swimming for sport dates all the way back to Ancient Egyptian and Ancient Greek times. Now hugely popular around the world as a leisure activity and a competitive sport, Swimming has featured at every modern Games and remains a real Olympic crowd-pleaser.

The basics

There are four strokes used in Olympic competition: Freestyle (essentially, front crawl), Backstroke, Breaststroke and Butterfly. All four strokes feature in the Individual Medley and Medley Relay events.

Olympic races are conducted over a variety of distances, from 50m (one length of the pool) all the way up to 1500m. All the pool events begin with heats, with the best swimmers from the qualifying rounds eventually racing for gold in the final.

Olympic Swimming, past and present

At the first few modern Olympic Games, Swimming events were held in open water. At Paris in 1900, for instance, they took place in the River Seine. However, the rules were formalised in 1908, when the London Games staged the first Olympic Swimming competition to be held in a pool.

Other than the Marathon Swimming 10km event, held in the Serpentine within Hyde Park, the Swimming competition will take place in the dazzling Aquatics Centre, built in the Olympic Park especially for London 2012.

Swimming
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