Whitney Throneburg
Mrs. Mauldin
English III
16 March 2015
“Take your mark.” the starter says in a steady, monotonic voice. As you bend your knees to grip the block, you can smell the chlorine in the air. So many thoughts are running through your mind but the most prominent one: “Do not slip.” If you slip now, all of your countless years of dedication will literally go down the drain. “Beep!” You push off the block with all of your strength and almost instantly you can feel the cool splash of the water hitting your face. “Yes!” you think, “I did not slip!” You cannot linger on that thought for too long though because you must focus on your race ahead. This is the 100 freestyle. As you break out from kicking underwater, you breathe and start to pull with your arms fast but not too fast. As you enter the first turn, you take one last breath and kick your legs over your body. You push off of the wall with all of your strength as soon as your feet touch. Lap two starts with a few really strong pulls to keep up your speed. Your eyes are following the line on the bottom of the pool searching for the "T" that symbolizes that the wall is near. This time after you flip you can feel the burn. Your legs are starting to hurt and you are beginning to lose feeling in your arms. This is lap three. This is where the weak start fading away. You start to kick and pull harder now. This turn is by far the best yet. Your feet plant firmly on the wall for a split second before you push off again. This is it, the last lap. You kick and pull harder than you ever have in your entire life. Everything you have left is going into this last lap. You take one, maybe two breaths total the rest of the way until you get to the wall. You finish by touching the wall with so much force that you feel as if your arm
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has broken. As you look up at the scoreboard, you can hardly believe that you have just beaten your previous best time by over a second! In swimming pools in neighborhood complexes this scenario is very common.
Johnny Weissmuller, Mark Spitz, Michael Phelps, and Rebecca
Soni have been a major influence and contributors to the sport of swimming.
To begin with, a history of the sport of swimming needs to be established. Discovered in
the Kebir desert, 6,000 year old acclaimed paintings portray Babylonian men who posses swimming ability (“Ancient Origins”). According to “Ancient Origins,” “In terms of competitions, the Europeans claim to have hosted the earliest of organized competitions, in
England in the 1790s, but this pales by comparison to evidence from Japan that suggests races were held 2,000 years ago.” First appearing as events in 1896, swimming at the Olympics consisted of freestyle and breaststroke, with backstroke being incorporated in 1904. At the 1912
Olympics women’s swimming was introduced and at the Olympics in 1956 butterfly was added
(“Swimming Equipment and…”). To summarize, swimming has been around for a considerable amount of time and has evolved in a numerous amount of ways.
To continue, Johnny Weissmuller is an example of a professional swimmer who has made many contributions to the sport, however, his road to greatness ought to
