I believe that's like saying we should only have a single "throw" event in athletics. Or why having hurdles events when you already have regular running ones.

I like that we can have more variety, more people competing, and overall different modalities to test human performance.

That's a funny take and I'm tempted to agree, since butterfly was the bane of my existence as a skinny swimmer in high school. But hopping on one foot was never a rule hack that gave you an advantage in some preexisting event. Butterfly was, and rather than banning it they made it a new event. Plus it looks cool, if you're a lot better at it than I was.

This quirk of competition is why swimmers can win a ridiculous number of medals. If swimming only had freestyle, Michael Phelps would have 7 gold medals instead of 23.

The first modern Olympics did have sack races. That would be entertaining.

You’re familiar with the walking competition?

There are much bigger problems with the Olympics than that. Such as selling the rights and advertising for billions while paying the athletes nothing.

Deliberately-inefficient compared to what? TFA leads with:

> Swimmers and coaches began to realise that breaststroke was quicker when a swimmer recovered their arms forward above the water and the arm technique – as well as the swimming term ‘butterfly’ – was born.

>deliberately-inefficent

If that's how we judge things, there should only be races on bicycles.