How Alick Wickham helped introduce freestyle swimming to the world

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5 days ago

On an autumn morning in 1901, a 14-year-old boy named Alick Wickham dived into a Sydney pool and swam a race that would change the course of sporting history.
Bronte Baths, a picturesque ocean pool hacked into sandstone cliffs, was hosting the Eastern Suburbs Swimming Carnival and Wickham was there competing in a 66-yard event.
But, unlike today, many swimming races were a case of any stroke goes.
"There were all kinds of what we would now see as wacky, eccentric things going on in the pool," Gary Osmond, a sports historian at the University of Queensland, tells ABC Radio National's No One Saw It Coming.
"Let's say there were eight swimmers in a race. Chances are you would have eight different strokes or certainly eight distinctive strokes."
There could have been breaststroke, mixed with a sidestroke, mixed with the stroke du jour, the trudgen stroke (which also had variations).
Yet one stroke was conspicuously absent. No one was swimming the front crawl that we now call freestyle — the stroke that's arguably the most prestigious and quickest in the world of competitive swimming.
"As common as it is today, it did not exist in competition prior to 1901," Dr Osmond says.
But on that day at Bronte Baths, Wickham dived in and swam the stroke that became known as freestyle.
Wickham was born in the Solomon Islands in 1886 and grew up around an area called the Roviana Lagoon.
He was the son of Pinge Naru and Englishman Frank Wickham, who had been shipwrecked in the region and decided to settle there.
"[The Roviana Lagoon] is a very beautiful place. It has a lot of little islands and white, sandy beaches," says Dorothy Wickham, a relative of the swimmer and the editor of the Melanesian News Network.
A young person's life there "is always about the sea", she says.
"If [children] weren't in school, then they would be spending most of their time in the sea."
During his childhood, Wickham learned a swimming style called the tapatapala, a crawling stroke which is like today's freestyle.
"We swim in the open ocean. So there are currents. And if you really have to swim against currents, the best way to swim … is what you call the freestyle now," Dorothy Wickham says.
As a boy, Wickham was sent from the Solomon Islands to Sydney, where his older brother was living.
And in this new, unfamiliar home, he sought out the familiar pastime of swimming. He would swim at Bronte Baths and decided to compete in the 1901 carnival there.
For that 66-yard event, Wickham swam his version of freestyle and won, easily.
As one newspaper put it: "A South Sea Island boy named Wickham romped away with the race, winning by fully a dozen yards."
According to Dr Osmond, this was the first recorded time that what we now recognise as the freestyle swimming stroke was used across the full length of a race.
He says some Australian competitive swimmers had been experimenting with a crawl-like stroke at this time.
This included one of the country's most prominent swimmers of the era, Dick Cavill, who had used it, along with other strokes, to finish a race.
"But Wickham came along and showed the potential of the stroke. Both the speed and his naturally refined style," Dr Osmond says.
"Other swimmers realised this is what they'd been looking for in their quest for speed."
Wickham started to gain attention, both because of his swimming and also because of the colour of his skin.
"Some of the terms used to describe Wickham in the press in the first couple of years were shocking," Dr Osmond says.
This was when the newly federated Australia was a deeply racist place, with Wickham's rise to fame coinciding with the introduction of the White Australia Policy.
The 1901 Immigration Restriction Act aimed at keeping Australia for white people only. And the 1901 Pacific Island Labourers Act meant that the majority of the Pacific Islanders living in Australia faced deportation.
"He did suffer racism in Australia, I think it must have been worse for him because he was mixed race … It wouldn't have been an easy life," Dorothy Wickham says.
But as the young star achieved bigger and bigger sporting success, the racial language about him in the media dramatically changed.
"[Wickham] goes from being the n-word … to being 'copper pelted' [and] 'bronzed'," Dr Osmond explains.
"He goes from being at the front end of negative racial stereotypes to being praised as a Pacific Islander."
In other words, success in the world of sport shielded Wickham from some of the racism that was commonplace at the time.
Wickham went on to set a number of NSW and Australian swimming records.
In 1903, he won a 50-yard world record (although Dr Osmond says "it's an unofficial world record" and didn't end up in the history books).
"So teammates at his club, including prominent swimmers, Olympic swimmers … started using his stroke," Dr Osmond explains.
Around this time, Australian swimmer Dick Cavill went to England and swam the crawling stroke, introducing it to the UK.
The technique became known as the Australian crawl and soon gained attention worldwide.
Before long, it was almost universally used in freestyle swimming competitions — where swimmers can use any stroke — so it's used metonymically.
However, while Wickham played a key role in popularising the stroke, there are even earlier reports of it being shown to people in the West.
"There's quite a notable report from the 1840s, when two First Nations men from upper Canada travelled to England as part of a delegation … And they swam what we now know as the freestyle or crawl stroke," Dr Osmond says.
"The press ridiculed it. They called it an ugly stroke, an octopus stroke … Because it wasn't 'elegant'. Breaststroke was seen as the model of elegance."
Wickham kept swimming for years and also became a prominent diver.
In 1918, he made a dive into Melbourne's Yarra River in front of 70,000 onlookers from a height of 62 metres — achieving a world record.
It was quite the plunge, with Wickham losing consciousness and having to be pulled out of the water. He told a newspaper he was confined to bed for days after the jump.
Wickham returned to the Solomon Islands in later life and passed away there in 1967, aged 81.
Today, his achievements are recognised in the Sport Australia Hall of Fame and the International Swimming Hall of Fame, which is based in the US.
But he's far from a household name in Australia or around the world.
As his relative, Dorothy Wickham feels an immense sense of pride.
"He has contributed a huge, huge part [to the sport] by bringing the freestyle swimming technique to the outside world and enabling people to have the joy of using this technique," she says.
Each year, at the Roviana Lagoon Festival, the signature event is the Alick Wickham Swim, where participants swim from the mainland to the spot where he grew up.
For Dr Osmond, it all goes back to that 1901 Bronte Baths race.
"[The race] turned the heads of Australian swimmers in the direction of the potential of this new stroke. It really did change swimming," he says.
But he stresses that the race itself is not the full story.
"One of the issues, though, is that [the race] gets simplified," Dr Osmond says.
"It overlooks the much more complicated story that involves paying tribute to people throughout the Pacific, and indeed throughout the world, who were doing this stroke with no recognition."