butterfly is interesting because it's faster than breaststroke (mentioned) but slower than freestyle. it also consumes far more energy than any other stroke.<p>to that end, i'm not sure why it exists, except that it's truly a unique style.<p>* i also still hold my high school's butterfly record, 20 years on.
Butterfly is the "three point shot" of swimming. If you can do a pool length of butterfly you are a "real" swimmer, kind of like a non-prayer three point shot implies you actually played basketball.
I never quite understood why there are Olympic medals for Butterfly swimming, but not things like "100m hop-on-one-foot sprint"<p>Like, why is being good at a deliberately-inefficent form of movement worth a medal in only this one case?
This quirk of competition is why swimmers can win a ridiculous number of medals. If swimming only had freestyle, Michael Phelps would have 7 gold medals instead of 23.
There are much bigger problems with the Olympics than that. Such as selling the rights and advertising for billions while paying the athletes nothing.
Deliberately-inefficient compared to what? TFA leads with:<p>> Swimmers and coaches began to realise that breaststroke was quicker when a swimmer recovered their arms forward above the water and the arm technique – as well as the swimming term ‘butterfly’ – was born.
I noticed the article pointedly didn't compare the stroke to the forward crawl, which is clearly both faster and more efficient.<p>There's no real way to compare the butterfly and the forward crawl that doesn't make the butterfly look like a ridiculous farce.
the butterfly stroke is the most <i>energy</i>-inefficient stroke, i believe, despite being quicker.
>deliberately-inefficent<p>If that's how we judge things, there should only be races on bicycles.