I tried this out this morning. Never could make fly work. It's kind of hard to time everything right and be confident I wasn't going to plant my ankle into the pool deck. I did make it work with breaststroke but I doubt it looked anything close to the efficiency on the video. Still, it was probably faster than my current ***->free turn. Here's my thoughts:
1 - Timing has to be pretty perfect. Flip too early and I felt like I was going to miss the wall. Flip too late and was afraid I was going to hurt myself.
2 - Even if you do everything right and legal, there might be a risk of getting dq'd.
3 - I found it hard to get my arms into a streamlined position before pushing off.
I only tried it a couple times so with some practice, I think it could be a lot better.
I have watched this over and over, and it looks to me like an illegal turn; it looks fine at full speed, but when you slow it down the swimmers right hand(and possible the left too) does not touch the wall. It looks like he gets really close but does a really well timed double arm pull.
. Definitely slower or else it would be more common
I disagree.
The turn shown in this video is phenomenally fast and there's no way an open turn can match it. I just wonder if it's somewhat physiologically limited. Perhaps this kid's build enables him to pull this off effectively where others would never be able to execute it as well.
Really? Seems to me if you just let yourself glide a little, you don't need to time the touch exactly right. The benefit of doing a flipturn, instead of an open turn, will easily erase any time deficit created by the glide.
