Ari-Pekka Liukkonen Just a Single Dolphin Kick En Route to 50 Free Gold

Anybody who has coached young age group swimmers is familiar with the “dive and go,” a technique often used by novice swimmers where they do something that looks like a belly flop and then just start moving their arms as fast as they can.

It’s something we often ‘teach out’ of young athletes, as they need to develop crucial underwater skills if they want to advance in the sport.

The next evolution of that technique, however, emerged last week at the European Aquatics Championships when 6’10” Finnish sprinter Ari-Pekka Liukkonen won his first major international gold medal at 32 years old. He won the 50 free in 21.61, beating out elite sprinters like Ben Proud, Kristian Gkolomeev, and Florent Manaudou.

In the men’s 50 free, the fastest event in swimming, where power is everything, it’s not uncommon for swimmers to have short underwaters. As the swimmers get bigger, there is more drag in the underwater phase, and the ability to generate more power above the water.

But Liukkonen has taken this technique to it’s ultimate conclusion: an underwater view of the start shows that he essentially takes one quick dolphin kick, then pops up and begins to race. Even his competitors are taking 4 or 5 dolphin kicks before emerging.

Watch the video below, starting at about 2:55, to see the underwater clip of the start. Liukkonen is in lane 3, 3rd from the top of the screen.

An above-water view of the same was posted by Arizona State assistant coach Herbie Behm on Twitter.

Liukkonen won European’s in the 50 free with the no-underwater kick strategy. If it ain’t broke 🤷‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/cQFfKukj8i

— Herbie Behm (@SirHerb_the3rd) May 24, 2021

Liukkonen’s height probably has something to do with his strategy – taller swimmers are generally not as good underwater as shorter swimmers.

In the 2016 Olympic final, most swimmers had fairly short underwaters, though none quite as jarringly-short as Liukkonen’s was. The exception was South African Brad Tandy, who went almost to the maximum 15 meters before emerging in lane 8:

The technique is not necessarily new for Liukkonen. In the video below of the final at the 2018 European Championships, he was also the first to emerge. It’s been difficult to find prior underwater shots of his swims to determine just how few dolphin kicks he was taking previously:

While Liukkonen has always been one of the first swimmers up from the underwater phase of the 50 free, the gap between him and the field seems to have grown as his career has progressed. See the below video from the 2013 World Championships, where he is 2nd from the right:

Here’s another video from a 2017 Pro Swim Series meet that Liukkonen won:

There always has been, and always will be, more than one way to get to the top of the mountain in swimming, and the best coaches find the techniques that work for their athletes. There is a set of fundamental skills, of course, that all swimmers should learn, but learning those skills, like underwaters, even if they’re not part of the final package, can be a useful part of building body awareness and feel for the water en route to a less-orthodox technique.