Early breaststroke swimming was the style of proper gentlemen. A gentleman was not a gentleman unless he was kind, considerate and gentle in the face of anything, especially danger. His swimming style had to reflect that demeanour and be smooth and calm. Calmness in the face of danger was a hallmark of the upper class gentleman.

Despite the danger of drowning, since most people in the early nineteenth century (and earlier) couldn’t swim, a gentleman with spare time to learn skills like swimming, cruised along like a white swan.

Racing was a natural evolution of swimming but going beyond the boundaries dictated by the genteel class was not easily displaced. A non-gentle-class swimmer, from the barbaric colonial region of Australia, invented a trudgeon stroke. This stroke was derived from a truly barbaric aboriginal swimmer from Solomon Islands who swam in a splashy crawl style. So if swimmer wanted to race in a barbaric way, even if it was faster, they were welcome to it; but rules were implemented so that breaststroke remained. The splashy crass strokes and the gentlemanly smooth breaststroke had separate rules even in early days of the Olympics.

A second attempt at changing breaststroke to an ungentlemany stroke happened after WW2. An over-arm stroke superseded regular smooth breaststroke swimming, so once again new rules had to be put in place to save breaststroke because the double over-arm stroke was faster and becoming dominant.

A new stroke was put in place to create an additional stroke called butterfly. This allowed the smooth gentleman’s stroke to be perpetuated once again; the rough butterfly could be swum by anyone wanting to swim that way, but the smooth calm gentleman’s stroke had rules despite it being slower. Breaststroke did not allow over-arm strokes. Rules that remain even today keeping the swanlike stroke a normal part of every Olympic Games.