Swimming at the 1956 Summer Olympics – Women's 100 metre freestyle Swimming at the 1956 Summer Olympics – Women's 100 metre freestyle The women's 100 metre freestyle event at the 1956 Olympic Games took place from November 29 to December 1. This swimming event used freestyle swimming, which means that the method of the stroke is not regulated (unlike backstroke, breaststroke, and butterfly events). Nearly all swimmers use the front crawl or a variant of that stroke. Because an Olympic size swimming pool is 50 metres long, this race consisted of two lengths of the pool. Prior to this competition, the existing world and Olympic records were: The following records were
Irish Amateur Swimming Association the national championship held in 1990 at the Guinness Pool. By the turn of the millennium Ireland still did not have an Olympic-sized pool placing any swimmer training here at an enormous disadvantage at international competition. At the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta Michelle Smith became Ireland's first Olympic medalist in swimming - winning three golds and a bronze. A shadow was cast over these medals when subsequently in 1998 she was banned for 4 years from the sport for tampering with a urine sample using alcohol, during a mandatory out of competition test. In the late 1990s various abuse