Author: rokur

According to Trinidad & Tobago’s Newsday, Olympic bronze medallist George Bovell III cheated death yesterday morning after he crashed his BMW car in an accident while on his way to spearfish at an oil platform in Mayaro. He was rushed unconscious to the Sangre Grande District Hospital where he received initial treatment and was stabilised, and had a CAT (CT) scan done which showed no major damage except for “one area of concern”. Unable to recall the accident, he also suffered cuts and contusions to his head, lacerations on his left ankle and complained of blurred vision while at St…

61-year-old Roy Lester says he lost his job as a lifeguard because he wanted to take the annual swimming test in bicycle shorts instead of the tiny trunks. “They were just trying to get rid of the older guys. To me the whole key to being a good lifeguard is experience.” Lester is a triathlete, but said no one his age should be wearing tiny trunks. State officials declined to comment. Source The New York Daily News via The Sydney Morning Herald.

Parents in Cupar, Fife have reacted with disbelief to a decision which bans swimming teachers from being in the water with children. A spokesperson for Fife Sport and Leisure Trust has said: “The decision that instructors should supervise from the pool side was based on guidance from Scottish Swimming, the national governing body for swimming. Part of the reason for this advice is improved safety of students in the pool because, as the case with lifeguards, higher elevation allows the instructor to better way to spot potential safety issues.” Via Fife Today.

Found these via Matt Abood and Amaury Leveaux on Twitter, Versus TV sport commercials. This one about You vs Them: And this one about being the underdog: “The odds may be stacked against you, fair enough. But what the odds don’t know, is this isn’t a math test” :-)

No, it doesn’t just go ‘pffffhht’. Smarter Every Day via Laughing Squid.

Romanian media says Prince Albert of Monaco fell in love with Romanian swimmer Camelia Potec at the Mare Nostrum event in Monte Carlo in 2000, when he is also said to have met Charlene Wittstock. The source is Potec’s former coach, Doina Sava, and Potec is said to have admitted that the Prince asked her to sit at his table after the Mare Nostrum event. Via romania-insider.com.

Indoor speed skating is for Dutch wimps, this is how it is done by true Norwegian vikings. Vikingfjord is a brand of Norwegian vodka, keeps you warm. Via UnofficialNetworks.

Interesting motivation here: The singer/songwriter left Hurst Castle to swim to Fort Albert, but the strong current of the tide dragged him towards Southampton. In the end, he ended up swimming about 5,000 metres — double what he had planned. Gareth said: “It was tough but for some reason I didn’t seem to get tired. I think it’s because I know the cause is so important and I didn’t fancy going through with my forfeit of walking down Ryde in the nude. This brave man raised £1,500 last year by walking around Isle of Wight in just his underpants and…

A creature described as a “sea animal” chewed off both arms of a Russian swimmer in an extremely rare attack in the waters off its Far Eastern Coast. Via Herald Sun. “A 25-year-old man was brought in in grave condition, unconscious. His arms were chewed off at the elbows,” the Interfax news agency quoted a source in a hospital in the Khasan district of the Far Eastern Primorye region as saying. “He’ll live,” the source added. Don’t like that description at all, calling what was most likely some kind of shark a “sea animal”. Think I’ll move our house a…

The USS Indianapolis was the last major American ship sunk by enemy forces during World War II, with the largest loss of life at sea in US history, as some 300 men went down with the ship and over the next four days another 500 or so died of starvation, exposure, suicide and shark attacks. We know it best from this scene out of “Jaws” below, but now it will be made into a movie, produced by Robert Downey Jr. himself. Via NBC Connecticut.