Swimming is an individual or team sport that requires to move your whole body against the resistance of the water. The competition will take place at the Baku Aquatics Centre. Both gender athletes will be competing for gold across the 32 events on offer. The main strokes used in competitive swimming are breaststroke, freestyle, backstroke and butterfly.
Swimming has featured on the program of all editions of the Games since 1896. The very first Olympic events were freestyle (crawl) or 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.
Information support by AZERTAG.