Trudgen’s stroke: swimming, Indigenous South Americans, and cultural appropriation

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ABSTRACT Historians have paid scant attention to the origins of the trudgen stroke, a now obsolete but once prominent swimming stroke. The style is attributed to an Englishman, John Trudgen, whose inspiration is vaguely given as South America, Buenos Aires or South American Indians. This article explores Trudgen’s life and locates the most probable source of his style to indigenous Paraguayans, with whom Trudgen lived and worked as an engineering apprentice in the 1860s, prior to and during the War of the Triple Alliance, as part of an English contingent employed to arm the Paraguayan national forces. The imprecise attribution of Trudgen’s stroke and elision of South American swimming cultures in the historiography of the stroke constitute a form of cultural appropriation. Drawing from the work of Hochan Kim, this article analyses the mechanics of this process through specific actions that dismiss, obscure, denigrate and crowd out the South American antecedents that inspired Trudgen. It draws parallels to similar cultural appropriation that has occurred with other swimming stokes and calls for renewed attention to the existence of global indigenous swimming cultures and their contributions to modern sport.