Aquatics

2011 National Games Medal Tally of Swimming

Teams	Gold	Silver	Bronze	Total
Maharashtra	13	10	12	35
Delhi	11	6	4	21
Karnataka	10	13	6	29
Madhya Pradesh	3	1	1	5
Goa	2	2	1	5
Services	1	3	2	6
Tamilnadu	0	2	7	9
Haryana	0	2	2	4
Gujarat	0	1	1	2
West Bengal	0	0	2	2
Punjab	0	0	2	2

 

2011 National Games Medal Tally of Diving

Teams	Gold	Silver	Bronze	Total
Maharashtra	4	5	1	10
Jharkandh	1	1	1	3
Uttar Pradesh	1	0	0	1
Karnataka	0	0	2	2
Services	0	0	1	1
West Bengal	0	0	1	1

 

2011 National Games Medal Tally of Water Polo

Men

Teams	Gold	Silver	Bronze
Kerala	1	0	0
Services	0	1	0
Maharashtra	0	0	1

 

Women

Teams	Gold	Silver	Bronze
Kerala	1	0	0
Delhi	0	1	0
Maharashtra	0	0	1

 

History of the sport

 

“Aquatics” is a collective term for four Olympic water events: Swimming, Water Polo, Diving, and Synchronized Swimming.  

 

Swimming has been part of the modern Olympics since the very first Games in 1896. Water Polo was added in 1900 during the Olympics in Paris, and Olympic diving began in 1904. It wasn’t until 1984 that Synchronized Swimming was added to the official Olympics program. Synchronized Diving and women’s Water Polo are the most recent additions, with competitions first appearing during the 2000 Games in Sydney, Australia.

 

An ancient discipline
Prehistoric man learnt to swim in order to cross rivers and lakes – we know this because cave paintings from the Stone Age depicting swimmers have been found in Egypt. Swimming was also referred to in Greek mythology.
 
Dawn of a sport
Swimming was not widely practised until the early 19th century, when the National Swimming Society of Great Britain began to hold competitions. Most early swimmers used the breaststroke, or a form of it.
 

Discovering the crawl
Based on a stroke used by native South Americans, the first version of the crawl featured a scissor kick. In the late 1880s, an Englishman named Frederick Cavill travelled to the South Seas, where he saw the natives performing a crawl with a flutter kick. Cavill settled in Australia, where he taught the stroke that was to become the famous Australian crawl.

 

Olympic swimming
Swimming has featured on the programme of all editions of the Games since 1896. The very first Olympic events were freestyle (crawl) and breaststroke. Backstroke was added in 1904.

 

In the 1940s, breaststrokers discovered that they could go faster by bringing both arms forward over their heads. This practice was immediately forbidden in breaststroke, but gave birth to butterfly, whose first official appearance was at the 1956 Games in Melbourne. This style is now one of the four strokes used in competition.

 

Women’s swimming became Olympic in 1912 at the Stockholm Games. Since then, it has been part of every edition of the Games. The men’s and women’s programmes are almost identical, as they contain the same number of events, with only one difference: the freestyle distance is 800 metres for women and 1,500 metres for men.