By far the hardest of all swimming strokes to learn is the butterfly stroke.
I do not know this from being able to do it. I’m atrocious at it.
I do know and have watched somebody who can, very well. It’s on par with watching a gymnast on top of their craft: a mixture of extreme dedication, counterintuitive coordination and raw, gifted talent.
Combine spiralling plane propeller arms with a dolphin’s kick, executed with improbable elegance, and you’re witnessing the queen of all swim strokes right there.
The stroke, alas, is under threat.
Swim England is indefinitely banning the stroke from British pools, because “wide strokes” take up too much space in a time of social distancing.
By doing so, it endangers a pioneering Australian creation. The International Swimming Hall of Fame credits the stroke as the invention of the trailblazing Australian swimmer Sydney Cavill who desired a faster breaststroke technique.
It’s one of Australia’s best exports: born from defiance (when swimmers first tried it competitively, they were disqualified by the hosting sporting body) and innovation (it makes the breast stroke less soporific). It is, literally, the stroke of genius.
Some, though, are welcoming its demise.
The Guardian’s G2 reported that: “The butterfly is considered show-offy, aggressive and galumphing. Its devotees – mostly men – generate a tremendous amount of turbulence to little effect.”
I have the perfect riposte to this. It’s someone who executed the best 50m butterfly stroke I’ve ever seen: my sister.
And it happened by accident. Or rather, because of an accident, caused by her clumsy, galumphing, over-excited older brother.
Aged five on a family holiday in Gran Canaria, I ignored my mum’s strict instructions to stay put, ran off and jumped straight into the deep end of the adult’s pool – and swiftly started to drown.
Mum, in equal parts alarmed and annoyed, had to jump in, fully clothed, dragging me out by my hair, coughing, spluttering and wailing.
I can just imagine my sister, Taren, sitting and watching, gazing at the water, then back at this melodramatic scene. Then back at the water again. Shimmering, inviting before her. She’s waiting, her patience juxtaposing with her brother’s oafish defiance. Her time was to come. A mermaid was born.
As soon as we returned home, Taren and I were promptly put into swimming lessons. I learnt the basics and then quickly, satisfied-with-self, gave up. Taren, meanwhile, flourished.
My sister had always been labelled “the quiet one” by everyone because of the contrast between my garrulousness and her more considered approach. Poor Taren couldn’t get a word in edgeways, something I still feel guilty about as an adult.
I guess I found my calling, my gift early on: my love of words and storytelling. Taren’s was about to reveal itself, quite spectacularly.
Her natural talent for swimming was spotted by our late dad, who encouraged her, pushed her, got up early to take her to lessons, then competitions.
“It was the only thing I thought I was good at,” Taren tells me. “When I did the butterfly, I felt like a dolphin released into the ocean. When I’m in the water, I just feel alive.”
Through swimming, the almost mute little mermaid found her voice: each kick a determined shout, each stroke a grunt of growth, each gasp a throttled scream into being.
As she got stronger and faster, she was ready for the toughest of them all: the butterfly.
The stroke eluded me – I gave up without really trying. Taren went back to it again and again until it became her speciality; until her inner metal became the outer metal of gold medal after gold medal.
It wasn’t until years later that dad suggested to me – highly uninterested at the time – that I really ought to see her 50m butterfly. That it really was something to behold. I reluctantly agreed to be dragged along. And then, I saw it.
I can still remember the smell of chlorine almost asphyxiating me as I watched my sister glide across the 50m pool like the insect that gave the stroke its name – a sight of stunning athleticism, rival-beating speed, almost splash-free grace and newfound confidence.
I wish I – a sullen, sulky, self-absorbed teenager – had said to her then what I want to say to her now: I was mesmerised and I was impressed. Really impressed.
No galumphing, no aggression, no men – just a young woman finding her stride through an Australian stroke.
It turns out, like many inventions, the stroke’s origin sits in murky, rather than clear, water. Most historians agree the dolphin kick came later, but the arm-out-of-the-water recovery stroke seems to be, according to the New Yorker “the result of a series of small innovations rather than of any single big one” – naming, in addition to Cavill, a German swimmer, Erich Rademacher, and a US one, Henry Myers.
But for me, the total owner of the butterfly stroke was actually a Brit and a woman: my funny, talented and brilliant sister, Taren.
It kind of breaks my heart that Taren, who lives in the UK, cannot recapture her glory moment in an English pool. Not at the moment, anyway.
I hope she knows that one day, in better times, she’ll be able to nail that 50m butterfly once more.
The mermaid will resurface.
• Gary Nunn is a Sydney-based freelance writer
