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Subjects | Fact sheet | Samples
Sport and leisure interests: Sample chronology
Swimming
c. 100 BC–c. 1 AD Swimming contests are held in Japan.
c. 100 Roman women show concern for their health and figures by lifting weights and swimming to stay in shape.
c. 700 A swimming race is described in the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf.
1603 Swimming is instituted in Japanese schools by imperial edict.
1715 English inventor John Lethbridge modifies and popularizes a medieval design for a diving suit, with a large helmet and air supply pumped from the surface.
28 May 1742 The Bagnio opens in Lemon Street, London, England; it is the first indoor swimming pool to be built in Britain in modern times.
1838 The German scientist Augustus Siebe invents an airtight diving suit with ventilation valves.
1842 US engineer James Buchanan Eads invents a diving bell that allows him to walk along the bottom of the Mississippi River to salvage losses from riverboat accidents.
1869 The Amateur Swimming Association is formed in England.
24 August 1875–25 August 1875 The English swimmer Matthew Webb, a captain in the British Merchant Navy, becomes the first person to swim the English Channel. He takes 21 hours and 45 minutes to cross from Dover, England, to Calais, France.
1907 Scottish physiologist John Scott Haldane develops a stage-decompression method that permits deep-sea divers to ascend safely.
1913 The German firm Neufeldt and Kuhnke introduce an armoured diving suit with ball-and-socket joints.
30 July 1932–14 August 1932 The 10th Olympic Games are held in Los Angeles, California. The USA wins 16 gold medals; Italy, 12; France, 10; Sweden, 9; Japan, 7; Hungary, 6; Finland, 5. National flags and the three-tiered victory stand are used in medal ceremonies for the first time; photo-finish equipment is first used in track events. The games are attended by 1.25 million spectators. Mildred 'Babe' Didrikson of the USA wins a gold medal in the javelin and the 80 m hurdles, and a silver medal in the high jump. Kusuo Kitamura of Japan, aged 14 years and 309 days, wins the men's 1,500-m freestyle swimming gold medal. US athlete Eddie Tolan wins the men's 100-m and 200-m gold medals.
20 August 1950–22 August 1950 The record times for swimming the English Channel are broken. Florence Chadwick of the USA swims across in 13 hours and 20 minutes, breaking Trudy Ederle's 1926 record by over an hour (20 August). Then Hassan Abd el-Rehim of Egypt makes the crossing in 10 hours 50 minutes, 15 minutes inside the 1926 record of Georges Michel.
1952 The butterfly stroke, developed by US swimmers in the 1930s and used in breaststroke races, is recognized and regulated as a separate stroke by the Fédération Internationale de Natation Amateur (International Swimming Federation or FINA).
September 1961 Antonio Abertondo of Argentina becomes the first swimmer to achieve a double crossing of the English Channel, swimming from England to France and back in 43 hours and 5 minutes.
27 July 1962 The Australian swimmer Dawn Fraser becomes the first woman to swim 100 metres in less than one minute, at the Olympic Pool in Melbourne, Australia.
28 August 1972–4 September 1972 At the Olympic Games in Munich, West Germany, Mark Spitz of the USA wins an unprecedented seven gold medals in swimming, all in world record times.
10 August 1973 Lynne Cox, a 16-year-old Californian, swims the English Channel in 9 hours 36 minutes to set a new women's world record.
July 1976 At the Olympic Games in Montreal, all the men's swimming titles are won by US swimmers except the 200 metres breaststroke which is won by David Wilkie of Great Britain.
29 July 1978 Penny Dean, a 23-year-old Californian, swims the English Channel in a new world record time of 7 hours 42 minutes.
13 August 1981 Jon Erikson from Chicago, Illinois, becomes the first person to swim the English Channel three times nonstop, in a time of 38 hr 27 min.
25 September 1988 At the Olympic Games in Seoul, South Korea, Kristin Otto of East Germany wins six gold medals for swimming, a record for a woman at one year's games.
6 August 1989 Mark Allen of the USA wins the men's title at the first official world triathlon championships in Avignon, France.
3 November 1997 Australian and US swimming officials protest against the results of the Chinese national swimming championships held in Shanghai in October in which two low-ranked Chinese female swimmers broke world records in the 200 and 400 metre relays. The officials allege that the Chinese swimmers were using performance-enhancing drugs.
12 January 1998 Chinese swimmer Yuan Yuan and her coach Zhou Zhewen are sent home from the World Swimming Championships in Perth, Australia, a week after being caught in possession of phials of the human growth hormone somatotrophin, a banned performance-enhancing substance used to build muscle bulk. Four other Chinese swimmers failed precompetition drug tests.
14 January 1998 Russian swimmer Alexander Popov sets a new world record for the 100-m freestyle of 48.93 seconds.
6 August 1998 The International Swimming Federation bans Irish swimmer Michelle Smith de Bruin from competition for four years for allegedly manipulating her urine sample from a random drug test with alcohol. De Bruin won three gold medals at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
25 September 1998 French swimmer Benoit Lecomte becomes the first person to swim across the Atlantic Ocean, after a 72-day journey from Hyannis, Massachusetts, USA, to the coast of Brittany, France.
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