Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish,
a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Oslo my name is Dan Shriver I am sitting here with Anna Chazinski Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go starting with you Andy my fact is
that there was once an Olympic sport where you had to dive into a pool and then glide along for a minute it was scrapped
because the main factor was how heavy you were don't you think
though like the main factor in the running race is how fast you are so why is it not fair to have a how heavy you are completely it's completely that's that's fair yeah you can train to be heavy in the same way you can train to run fast really I guess so you could see the winner coming along before the game even starts right he's got gold well this was this was the thing called the plunge for distance was the official name of it so basically you dived in you weren't allowed to move you weren't allowed to swim at all you had to keep your head under the surface of the water and then you were timed and they saw how far you would get in either 60 seconds or until you put your head up above the water and another thing is it's not a great spectator spot is it it it got called competitive floating it's the least spectatory sport imaginable it it happened once in st.
Louis in 1904 yeah and there were lots of reviews at the time which were pretty negative people said the competitors merely throw themselves heavily in the water and float along like icebergs in the shipping lanes and this this was in st.
Louis in 1904 yeah that's right yeah okay so um there was lots of great things that happened in that um Olympics in the water polo the Americans said
that instead of having a fully inflated ball you could have it slightly unflated
if that's a word but actually to score a goal you had to hold the ball underwater in the net rather than throwing it and the Germans thought
that this was complete nonsense they called it soft water polo and refused to compete two of the winning American water polo team were dead six months later and they think it might have been
because the matches took place in the lagoon that was used as a sump for the animal and vegetable waste from all the other exhibits oh god and the Germans they brought their own diving board for the diving competition it was made out of a special coconut matting and they insisted
that all the scoring be on the acrobatics you did in the air and it didn't matter how you entered the water yeah that was a massive controversy wasn't it in the diving and this was what was called the fancy diving which is what used to be the name for the high dive basically and yeah I think the person who won was an American and the guy who'd made the trophy to present to the winner was German and he refused to hand over the trophy
because he was so outraged
because this is bullshit he just landed well the stuff in the air was useless it was a very interesting olympics it was only 12 countries uh competed in the 1904 olympics and it largely was
because no one wanted to go to st louis they just saw it's too far away it's inaccessible so but the Americans said okay well we'll just put more people in so 81 percent of the people who competed in the 1904 olympics were Americans so there were 630 athletes in total 523 were Americans they won 239 medals still a record to this day of most medals won by a single nation in an olympics I think the runner up was Germany who got 13 right but this this is a thing this is a controversy in fact even in Norway so the USA the that's where we are
if the listeners haven't realized so the USA fielded athletes who were immigrants from Europe who hadn't actually become US citizens yet so they really weren't they shouldn't have been competing for the USA and the Norwegians were still annoyed about this in 2012 they were still officially requesting
that the results were changed 108 years after these olympics we've got to right historical wrongs where we can you know James you were saying
that I think you said the Germans brought their own dive board yes um well actually it generally people did bring their own dive boards to dive in competitions so this was until the 1960s basically so the diving board that we know today which is the really springy one you know when you see them dive and I always think it's going to snap
because it bends so much and that was invented by a guy called Raymond Rood and he sort of tried it out and I know it's a good name um he tried it out in a neighbor's garden for a few years and it worked and so he brought it to the olympics in 1960 but before that divers would just bring their own boards and then they'd get there and they'd sometimes do some swaps and they'd try out each other's boards to see which ones they liked and it was only when he brought his and everyone requested his to the extent that he had to like telegram back or whatever to send some more over
because it was so in demand that people were like should we just use this one did they bring the ladders as well or is it just the I don't think you need a special ladder so much so I think to get up yeah no I agree you need a ladder yeah yeah and that's you're also very good at the high jump well there might be what an event that would be where you do the pole vault onto it and then dive off it um do you know how they make those uh those aluminium boards it's very cool so they're made of aircraft grade aluminium which I didn't know um and they take a massive cylinder of aluminium and they heat it to a very high temperature and then they squeeze it through a massive press with thousands of tons of pressure on it so it's like pushing it through a toothpaste tube basically just sort of very hot aluminium toothpaste well the first one was made of a plane wing in fact sorry the first one was made of an aeroplane wing before the I heard I heard penguin I heard penguin as well yeah I mean their wings are kind of flat aren't they they're almost like diving parts they're quite bouncy blubbery quality