Plunge for distance

Plunging

Competitor floating after plunging (1918)
First played	1800s. English championship created in 1883.
Characteristics
Type	Aquatics
Presence
Olympic	1904 only

The plunge for distance is a diving event that enjoyed its greatest popularity in the 19th and early part of the 20th century, even being included as an official event in the 1904 Summer Olympics. By the 1920s, it began to lose its popularity and slowly disappeared from U.S. and English swim competitions.

According to the 1920 Official Swimming Guide of the American Swimming Association, the plunge for distance "is a dive from a stationary take-off which is free from spring from a height of 18 inches above the water. Upon reaching the water the plunger glides face downward for a period of 60 seconds without imparting any propulsion to the body from the arms and legs." To determine the total distance traveled, the measurement was taken from the farthest part of the body from the start, "opposite a point at right angles to the base line." Generally, being heavy was an advantage in the sport. The 60-second limitation appears to have been instituted at the English Plunging Championship around 1893.

In later years, the plunge was subject to criticism as "not an athletic event at all," but instead a competition favoring "mere mountains of fat who fall in the water more or less successfully and depend upon inertia to get their points for them."John Kiernan, sports writer for the New York Times, once described the event as the "slowest thing in the way of athletic competition", and that "the stylish-stout chaps who go in for this strenuous event merely throw themselves heavily into the water and float along like icebergs in the ship lanes." Similarly, an 1893 English report on the sport noted that spectators were not enamored of it, as the diver "moves after thirty or forty feet at a pace somewhat akin to a snail, and to the uninitiated the contests appear absolute wastes of time."

The exact origins of the sport are unclear, though it likely derives from the act of diving at the start of swimming races. The 1904 book Swimming by Ralph Thomas notes English reports of plunging records dating back to at least 1865. The 1877 edition to British Rural Sports by John Henry Walsh makes note of a "Mr. Young" plunging 56 feet in 1870, and also states that 25 years prior, a swimmer named Drake could cover 53 feet.

The English Amateur Swimming Association (at the time called the Swimming Association of Great Britain) first started a "plunging championship" in 1883. By 1900 the "plunge for distance" event was being regularly mentioned in reports on U.S. swimming meets, and was mentioned in the New York Times and Brooklyn Eagle at least as far back as 1898.