Faster, Higher, Stronger

Stories of the Olympic Games: Swimming

The series telling the history of the Olympics explores how swimmers have swam faster and faster to win gold. From its earliest beginnings in chilly waterways open to the elements, the Olympic swimming competition has driven the development of technique in all the four strokes. Faster, Higher, Stronger reveals how the front crawl first evolved in Australia after a Solomon Islander introduced the stroke from the rough seas of the Pacific. How the butterfly grew out of the breaststroke, but only after swimmers began swimming the older, more sedate stroke with a double over-arm action to go faster. Combining cutting-edge filming techniques to analyse performance, period reconstruction and unique archive footage from the very earliest Olympics onwards, the programme includes interviews with great Olympic champions such as Mark Spitz, Dawn Fraser and Ian Thorpe, as well as contributions from British medal winners Sharron Davies, David Wilkie and Adrian Moorhouse.