The dolphin kick—sure to make the butterfly stroke one of the fastest Olympic swimming events at the Los Angeles Games this summer—was born at the University of Iowa. It's hard to believe. But in one serendipitous experience a creative coach and a swimmer who was goofing off with his remarkably flexible feet, both came together in the Field House pool one day and observed a phenomenon that was to make history. The year was 1932.
And the Iowa coach was David Armbruster, the crusty and creative mentor of Iowa swimmers from 1917-1958. During his tenure at the University of Iowa, Armbruster was to coach two of his charges—Wally Ris and Bowen Strassforth—to Olympic medals. He was also the man to perfect the kicking board, to invent the first all-rubber swimming suit and trunks, to design overflow scum gutters to make competitive swimming faster, to come up with the underwater observation window, to develop the tumble turn, and to singlehandedly promote his discovery of the dolphin kick.
Jack Sieg was the varsity swimmer who inspired Armbruster to that last accomplishment. It all began with Sieg pretending to be a fish. Arms trailing by` his side, Sieg was weaving his way through the water at a good clip. Armbruster watched and, curious to discover if the swimmer was really going as fast as he appeared to be, asked Sieg to race against the best crawl swimmers on the team. Sieg's flipper-like feet motions beat out the flutter kickers and started Armbruster on his way to enlarging the scope of Olympic swimming events.
For the next 20 years, Armbruster devoted much of his energy fighting for the eligibility of the combination butterfly stroke/dolphin kick in NCAA competition. The reason for his commitment: Armbruster had noticed a trend among competitive swimmers on his teams. The men were bored with the breaststroke. Calling it a "girl's stroke," they wanted the excitement and speed of the crawl. Armbruster hoped that the increased speed that resulted from using Sieg's dolphin kick with the new butterfly stroke would appeal to the men and keep more of them competing in the breaststroke event. He was right.
To understand just what it was that Sieg and Armbruster discovered in the Field House pool that day in 1932, imagine what it's like to swim without the use of your arms. You can either wriggle in one spot like a worm on a hook—or you can become a fish, using the undulations of your body to propel yourself forward. Sieg's uncommon flexibility and Armbruster's careful coaching led to the realization that humans, like fish, could learn to move through the water using only rippling body movements for propulsion.
Think of how a frog moves as opposed to a fish or dolphin. The frog, even when startled and moving very quickly, will launch himself forward in a series of choppy thrusts. His powerful legs propelling him, he shoots through the water. But his progress slows when he must pull his legs back up toward his body for another stroke. In so doing he fights against his own forward progress.
For Armbruster, Sieg's water antics were like the proverbial apple falling on Newton's head. And because Sieg's ankle joints were unusually supple, the discovery of a new and efficient way to move through the water was made graphically clear. Armbruster's efforts to improve competitive swimming at the University of Iowa were going on concurrently with some exciting changes in the sport around the world. It had been only 100 years or so since swimming had begun to regain its good reputation among athletes. Highly popular during the glory days of ancient Greece and Rome, swimming had once been considered important physical training for the warrior class. But during the Middle Ages the sport fell out of favor. People believed that swimming was a health hazard, an agent in spreading bubonic plague.
But when the Olympic Games were revived in Athens in 1896, swimming was included as one of the competitive categories. It was actually just about the time that Armbruster and Sieg were discovering the speed of the dolphin kick that a new arm movement was introduced as an alternate to the orthodox breaststroke.
Known as the double overarm or butterfly, this new stroke brought the swimmer's arms out of friction with the water. However, the new arm stroke combined with the old frog-style kick was very tiring for swimmers, who often lost precious racing seconds when they switched back to the orthodox breaststroke to rest their aching back muscles. The traditional frog kick also worked against them, as with every thrust of their legs their forward motion was slightly retarded. Finding a kick that fit naturally with the butterfly stroke was crucial if the newly developed butterfly movement was ever to be taken seriously as a competitive swim stroke.
When Armbruster replaced the frog kick with Sieg's dolphin kick and combined it with the new butterfly stroke—legalized in the mid-thirties by the NCAA rule makers—he came up wth a swimming style that worked, but one that was declared illegal by athletic authorities.
Simply stated, because the legs were required to move up and down together instead of laterally as in the spread-leg frog kick, the NCAA ruled Armbruster's dolphin kick illegal. While modifications adopted in 1936 resulted in a quasi-dolphin motion, the altered dolphin failed to offer as much speed as the original, and Armbruster refused to be appeased.
Believing firmly in the need for more swimming speed to promote the popularity of the sport and always committed to Sieg's original dolphin kick, Armbruster would not give up the fight. For years, he heard the original Iowa City kick referred to disparagingly as a "flying fish" stroke. Coaches in the Big Ten, AAU, and NCAA opposed its use. Ironically, though, many European coaches wrote to Armbruster requesting details on the original dolphin kick.
In 1956, the International Olympic Committee adopted Armbruster's and Sieg's 1932 discovery—the suddenly respectable dolphin kick—and the butterfly gained status as a separate Olympic event. At long last, American coaches were forced into approving the controversial kick. Not to have done so would have handicapped American swimmers in international competition.
