Thirteenth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

Swimming, more than most other sports, is historically deeply bound up in people’s social identity and their ethnicity. The roots of this distinction between swimmers and non-swimmers, and among different styles of swimming, go back to the last Ice Age, when many people across northern Eurasia stopped swimming. When the Ice Age ended and these non-swimmers spread out southward and encountered swimmers, they developed a set of justifications to explain their own fear of the water: they said swimming was dangerous, and it was immodest. Disturbing the water by splashing displeased the gods. And swimming was something other people did; it was best left to foreigners. In the late Bronze Age and Iron Age, as these non-swimmers slowly started to learn to swim again, they shifted to thinking of swimming as a skill for sophisticated, educated elites: thus Odysseus can swim, but not his crew; Julius Caesar was an excellent swimmer, but not his troops. A second decline in swimming in the late Middle Ages led to the shocking discovery that Africans and Indigenous Americans were much better swimmers than Europeans — and now Europeans justified the slave trade by associating swimmers with animals, as not fully human. In the 19th and 20th centuries, an emphasis on the Classical roots of the British Empire led Europeans again to claim swimming for educated elites, and this time, they used segregation to force Indigenous and lower-class swimmers out of the water. Many of these ethnic and racial prejudices still create problems today.