Splash!

‘Splash!’ weaves a 10,000-year-old tale that begins in a bone-dry cave in the remote southwest corner of Egypt, winds its way through ancient Greece and Rome, flows mostly underground through the Dark and Middle Ages, and then re-emerges in the wake of the Renaissance before ending on the runway of the Tokyo Olympics. But swimming is also about more than feats of aquatic endurance or the terror of the bottomless deep. Its history offers a multi-tiered tour through religion, fashion low and high, architecture, sanitation and public health, colonialism, segregation and integration, sexism, sexiness, guts, glory and much, much more. Unique and compulsive, ‘Splash!’ sweeps across the whole of humankind’s swimming history, with great wit and humour.