By Terry Laughlin It looks so competent, so coordinated, so necessary.
Athletes just starting a pool-training program especially covet it.
Powerful, sleek swimmer glides up to the wall, tucks and somersaults as neatly and compactly as any gymnast, and with neither ripple nor pause is gone again, slicing back down the pool in the opposite direction. It seems the very signature of the advanced swimmer, an athletic flourish like mogul skiing that forever separates the confident and the accomplished from the merely adequate. When Arluck was a star swimmer for Colgate University 30 years ago, flip turns were considered too difficult for wide use. Plenty of Masters swimmers, in fact, have never mastered the flip turn and see no reason to bother. Maybe it's not that critical after all.