| Let me be clear: - Once you start drowning, you don't look like a good swimmer no matter if you're Phelps or not - Videos selected specifically to have people who start drowning in them will show people at their absolute worst swimming moment - You do not have to be a poor swimmer to start drowning at your worst moment - There is no reason to think that the drowners wouldn't have passed a "do three laps in the pool and tread water for N minutes" type test - Requiring a basic swim competency before being allowed to use floats will no doubt reduce the risk of these incidents and is reasonable to do regardless If you saw a video of a car crash, would you assume that driver had not taken driver's ed? Or rather that they were careless or caught by surprise or had a malfunction or hit a sudden patch of ice or even were intoxicated? If the lesson you took from this was "this pool was irresponsible in allowing these obviously terrible swimmers in" then you got completely the wrong message. Please don't take the fact that your kid passed her swim test at Girl Scouts to mean that she too won't flip off a tube suddenly, gulp in water down the wrong way and be overcome by our animal instincts. Such an assumption is literally dangerous. |
Just to be clear so you understand where I'm coming from, I'd say that somebody who could do three laps but not four is a poor swimmer. 75 yards (or even 150 meters assuming a 50 meter pool) is a very lax standard for calling somebody a swimmer. Technically yes, it proves you can swim. But it certainly doesn't prove you're good at it.
In my experience one of the core facets of being a skilled swimmer is being less likely to panic (the others being endurance and technical skill.) Without one of these three it's easy to find yourself in hot water. Technical skill is important because without enough of it, even a very fit person will reach the limits of their endurance quickly. A cool head is important because if you panic, your technical skill can't be put into practice (this is the most difficult part of teaching most kids how to swim. A lot of time goes into making them comfortable in the water so that they're less likely to panic. I've still got that damn "wheels on the bus" song stuck in my head many years later...) Endurance is arguably the least important of the three, provided you have a cool head and sufficient technical skill to float on your back until rescued, but it's still obviously important.
The reason I'm saying that person is probably a poor swimmer at best is because of the severity of the circumstances that caused her to panic. It's unlikely but not impossible that a skilled swimmer would panic when unexpectedly dunked like that. I'm trying not to speak in absolutes. Maybe she's a skilled swimmer who got a lung-full of water when she went over backwards, but that's less likely than her being a poor swimmer or nonswimmer. I've seen a lot of skilled swimmers put themselves in much worse situations than that and recover from it fine. I'm sure sometimes they don't, but most of the time they do. I once saw a very skilled swimmer full of teenage bravado do a cannonball jump into the middle of a floating pool cover, a literal death trap, but he didn't panic and got out of it alive.
Whether or not she attended drivers ed, aka swimming lessons, I cannot say. For all I know she might have several weeks of swim practice under her belt, or zero. Some people take to swimming very quickly, while other people struggle with it despite the best efforts of the instructors. Attending swimming lessons doesn't make you a good swimmer anymore than attending drivers ed makes you a good driver. It aims to, but won't necessarily succeed.