Comment by cjcenizal 2 days ago
Amazing! This is about the dolphin kick performed on its side, rechristened “the fish kick.” I couldn’t fathom (ha) why the same kick rotated 90 degrees could be faster but it turns out that the kicking motion is constrained by the motion of the water around it. In the dolphin kick, the water moves up and down and is limited by the water’s surface and pool’s bottom. The swimmer frees themself of these constraints by turning on their side.
Middle lanes are faster, and for some reason swimmer with the fastest record gets the middle in most events, which always seemed weird to me -- it's a positive feedback system. Seems like you should give the advantage to the people who are behind, not ahead... but that's common in sports and in modern society for some reason.
Giving advantages to the better participants is a practice common across a variety of racing sports. The idea being that, if you could earn an advantage by doing worse, then in a race where you know at a certain point that you can't medal anyway, it would be optimal to just intentionally slow down to try to come in last and secure an advantage in the next race.
I've heard this said before, and I understand the reasoning, but I don't think it's good enough. We should be aiming for equality at the start of a race, not giving the better people a head start. If qualifying races are broken in the way, then just randomize the starting order. Literally do a random draw as people are walking/driving up to the start. It would make the events far more interesting as well.
It’s not strange at all. People want to see records broken. Levelling the playing field works against that goal.
Sports is an aspirational medium of entertainment. People want to see excellence. They want to see dynasties. Too much fairness and balance leads to loss of interest.
Look at the NBA. We’re in a period of unprecedented parity and balance. It seems like every year brings a different championship team. Ratings are way down and loads of people are complaining about the CBA which was written with the goal of bringing more parity to the league, a goal it’s quite obviously achieving!
On the other hand the NFL’s hard salary cap and consequent parity is what has made it the most popular US professional sporting league. People in the US don’t want to see big markets buy their way to championships.
I know that's the narrative about the NBA lately but it's just that - narrative.
It's far from proven that the short-lived "parity" that has emerged in the aftermath of the KD Warriors dynasty is the cause of down ratings.
I do personally dislike it though and find the parity via CBA to be artificial. It just causes continuity on a contender to be untenable.
And continuity is what makes for good basketball, hence why dynasties are so fun to watch. It's not just that they win, a lot. It's that they have a consistent style of play with a consistent cast of players (stars and role players) that fans get to know over the course of those dynastic years.
> People want to see records broken.
Not always. Some of the most prestigious horse races in the UK, US, and Australia ar handicap races. The horse that is most successful carries the most weight. The handicapper attempts to create a dead heat.
Just thinking if it's done F1 style it is fair. It's fresh at each competition.
If it's based on past times that creates possibly a feedback loop but depends on details. E.g. can a swimmer use a non competition record towards their qualification.
Track & Field races stagger the starting positions, to compensate for the outer lanes of the track being longer. American football has the teams switch goals every quarter, to even out the advantages of having the wind at your team's back.
Why should swimming be different?
In US sports it is very common in the tournament for a single season, or in a single event to reward better performance earlier in that same season or same tournament. I like this because it incentivizes doing well early in a season.
On the other hand, the NFL and NBA give better draft odds for to teams who did badly in the previous season. I also like this because it allows teams who don't have the (comparatively) massive resources of a team based in a large market to compete. This is NEGATIVE feedback, and of course fans of teams in large markets don't like it. Even so, negative feedback is the core of making a stable system.
To summarize, in a single season or in a single tournament, doing well is rewarded. Across seasons, some sports have mechanisms to help poor teams become better.
It seems like the objectively fair solution is that everyone swims the exact same lane in a still pool and is timed.
Seeing the other competitors right next to you is often a factor in how hard one pushes themselves in a race, no matter the species.
I vote in favor of this idea and will even contribute $5 towards building the necessary O'Neill cylinder.
Now we only need to get Elon on board to fund the rest.
> for some reason
It is most likely because we are bad at pattern matching. By default we reward anything we perceive as positive, regardless of who we think is causing it or what the long-term consequences might be.
It takes some education to recognize the long-term effects of rewarding the wrong things, and then it takes even more education to not worry about the very long-term effects at all.
If slower qualifiers got better position, then what you'd get would be qualifiers deliberately trying to sandbag themselves for that. Such an incentive is never a good look for sports.
Any turbulence created by waves and vortices smashing into hard surfaces is going to slow the swimmer down. To paraphrase an old adage, smooth is fast.
I'm inclined to concur with onlypassingthrough. If the resulting wake is similar to fish locomotion (e.g. thunniform or similar) vortices will shed off in a Karmen Vortex Street that spreads laterally with distance behind the swimmer (potentially into other lanes, and propulsive efficiency of propulsors are generally less efficient in turbulant vice laminar open-water flow... but not always, it can depend on the 'structure' [how chaotic] the flow is).
The magnitude of the energy in that turbulent wake will depend on how efficiently the oscillating fin interacts with water over time to produce forward thrust. The cool thing about oscillating foils as opposed to rotating thrusters, is that when the fin 'swoops' once it creates Vortex 'A' spinning clockwise, and when it 'swoops' back the result would be a Vortex 'B' spinning counterclockwise, and the two vortices will partially cancel out. That cancellation serves to recover energy from Vortex 'A' and the energy is transferred back into forward thrust.
In other words, fish tails create trails of contrarotating vortices and continually push off of them. It's like walking up a springy staircase, where each step you make, a little energy is recovered to bounce you up to the next step.
In theory, if you had a swimmer in front of you, generating a Karmen Vortex Street and not effectively canceling out those vortices, but instead just shedding vortices, you can use the energy from the swimmer in front of you to 'spring' yourself forward - barely using any energy yourself. Those complex hyrdodynamic relationships could be why some swimmers/flyers tend to fly in specific formations with other animals in their school/flock.
Bottom line, I would bet that any residual vortices that spread into adjacent swimming lanes will tend to interact chaotically and result in unstructured turbulance, which should yield less optimal swimming conditions for swimmers in those lanes.
> you can use the energy from the swimmer in front of you to 'spring' yourself forward
When I swam competitively in the early 1980s, we did this during workouts; we'd all swim in a line with very close spacing, and switch off who was in front after every lap (two lengths--this was in a 25 meter pool). Being in front you could feel the extra work you were doing.
>you can use the energy from the swimmer in front of you to 'spring' yourself forward
This bears out in the real world. Much like a peloton in cycling, swimming directly behind another swimmer can be far more energy efficient than swimming by yourself and feel like you are getting pulled along for the ride.
Does that give advantage to those in the middle lanes?