One of the guys on our team was DQ'd over the weekend because of the final breaststroke turn in a 400 IM. He misjudged the distance from the wall and took an extra stroke (without a kick). Is this illegal?
Originally posted by Allen Stark
Going stroke-kick-stroke-kick-stroke is legal(unless he dolphined with last stroke.)
That's what I thought. He's been swimming breaststroke over 40 years and has never been DQ'd.
Originally posted by Allen Stark
Rob is right,but that seems an unlikely thing for someone to do.Going stroke-kick-stroke-kick-stroke is legal(unless he dolphined with last stroke.)
I'm still trying to envision how this could happen. When I've completed a stroke-kick cycle, my body is stretched into a streamline. Obviously, if my hands touched the wall at that point, the lap would be over, so let's assume that they didn't.
If I now begin stroking, my hands come back toward my shoulders, which means that they will presumably not touch the wall then, either. So it would seem that they couldn't touch the wall until I began recovering them forward. But by then I would normally be into my kick. The only possibility I can think of is that as he was doing his arm stroke, he realized that he was close enough to the wall that he didn't need to do a kick, so he left his legs in a streamline and just recovered his arms forward?
I reread the rules on breaststroke, and was surprised at how little they say on this subject. The only statement I could find that even addresses the subject of alternating strokes and kicks is:
"Some part of the swimmer's head shall break the surface of the water at least once during each complete cycle of one arm stroke and one leg kick, in that order, except after the start and each turn the swimmer may take one arm stroke completely back to the legs and one leg kick while wholly submerged."
