The history of synchronised swimming is a surprisingly compelling tale

SWIMMING
Swimming Pretty: The Untold Story of Women in Water
Vicki Valosik
Liveright , $47.99

Ok. Breathe. Balance. Arms up. Tuck-in that chin. Shoulders forward, deep breath. And … spring. Surfaced? If so you’re ready for the 421 pages of intimate detail about women and swimming.

The author, Vicki Valosik is that rare – no, unique – compilation: scholar and a competitive synchronised swimmer. Because of the recent Olympics we know about and admire synchronised swimming, although others might know it through the more decorative Esther Williams. Valosik the scholar does not forget either Williams or the Olympic Games. Actually, she forgets nothing and this can be troubling in a book about women and swimming. You need to be mighty capable in The Butterfly Stroke, i.e. skimming lightly through.

But hey – did I really say that? Nope, someone else on the team – if you are doing the grand and lazy Orstralain Crawl through Swimming Pretty you can and will pick up some fantastic knowledge because the full and accurate title is Swimming Pretty: The Untold Story of Women in Water. A shadow title might be: Women Athletes and the Long Reach of Pervicacious Patriarchy.

It was the great Esther Williams who carries this book. She also uttered those soon-to-be immortal words: “If you’re not strong enough to swim fast, you’re probably not strong enough to swim ‘pretty’.” (Pretty, of course, is a sleight-of-hand for “sexy” in the pervy patriarchy.) Williams was talking to an aqua-entrepreneur, Billy Rose. There were never any flies on Williams. Throughout the book the “baked-in sexual harassment” is shocking to contemporary eyes. Just as well to be reminded though, what women in bathing costumes and what beauty contests were really about.

Williams was an athletic teenager from LA who expected to swim in the cancelled 1940 Olympics. Almost impossible to imagine today, but Williams did not want fame. She started swimming in the San Francisco Acquacade, a water entertainment, because she wanted to marry and needed money to supplement her office job. Alas, Williams had apple-pie appeal, wholesome in a long-legged American way. And she could swim pretty.

She was also “wildly photogenic”, so when Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM Studios, decided that skating extravaganzas were the past and uttered his own soon-to-be immortal words: “Melt the ice, get a swimmer, make it pretty!” Williams was on hand. By 1943 Esther Williams had not only her own star dressing room, but her own pool and the “Acquamusical” was born, and swimming became America as much as America became swimming. One sportswriter reporting on the Aquacinema explosion wrote: “It’s swimming isn’t it? And the kids are nuts about it.” It was helpful that in the water the swimmers could make all those moves that, because of the Hays Code, couldn’t be done in a bed.

Williams wasn’t just pretty, she was a superb athlete. No one gave her instructions in the water, which did indeed seem to be her natural element; she often said the water was her “co-star”. There was nothing she could not do in her element, there was no way she could be clumsy or ungraceful. Smiling underwater and holding it? Opening your eyes wide? Keeping your costume decent, not to mention your hair. And kissing, of course.