The Deceptive Calm of Olympic Open-Water Swimming

Twenty-six women raced a ten-kilometre course this morning in the choppy aquamarine waters off Copacabana Beach, completing the last of the Olympic women’s swimming events, and the only one not held in a pool. (The men will follow tomorrow.) It was a fitting conclusion to the past week’s exhilarating and historic indoor aquatic performances. Although marathon swimming, as the contest is known, only became an Olympic event in 2008, at the Beijing Games, it nods to the sport’s ancient origins more than anything that happens now in a pool. It is also, arguably, much harder. Pool swimming is a spectacle of perfection, with each competitor alone in a lane, exhibiting peak mastery of one of the sport’s four strokes—backstroke, breaststroke, butterfly, or freestyle. Open-water swimming is cruder, less elegant, more primal. The women racing today, for roughly two hours, had to contend physically and psychologically not only with the elements—a strong opposing current, wind chop on the surface, a blazing sun, water high in bacteria—but also with one another, ceaselessly, right up to the last hundredth of a second.