Olympian Effort

It has proved hard to ignore the Olympics in our house. Although I'm not too sure about watching it number one daughter seems to find it fascinating. Swimmers with unpronounceable names doing unimaginable actions to move through the water. Why were things like butterfly and breast stroke invented? Presumably the human race developed the art of swimming as a way of avoiding the alternative, which is drowning. Once in the water the imperative is often to get out again as fast as possible, especially if being perused (or indeed pursued) by a shark.

So I'm confused about the point in time at which we sat down and said "Right, we know that the fastest way to get through the water is by front crawl. But just to make things more interesting we'll invent lots of silly strokes which you can use as well. Then we'll invent competitions in these silly strokes and have rules so that we can ban people if they don't swim this way properly".

We don't do it in running. We don't have the "100 metres hurdles walking sideways whilst doing the hand jive". So why do we do it in swimming? And I'm still horribly confused as to how synchronised diving was invented.