#competitive-swimming

#competitive-swimming

My truest taste of regret happened when I was just 16. I was a junior in high school and feeling fully overwhelmed by things I had no control over. That feeling came directly from living in a family unraveling at the seams, but I was too young to understand what was happening. My emotions were packaged up tightly, so I grabbed hold of things I did understand, and what I understood more than anything else was swimming.

This highly physical comedy about two competitive swimmers begins at the beginning not with a referee's whistle but a stand-alone aquatic opus racing through humans' evolution from fish. In caps, goggles and bathing suits, Alexander Burnett and Ellie Whittaker recount our abiding passion for the water, from the earliest forms of life to Napoleon diving into an especially wet misremembering of Waterloo,