Author: rokur

I must confess that Alexander Dale Oen’s 100 breast victory in Shanghai was one of the most beautiful moments in my time in swimming, only days after the Utøya killings, and with the Norwegian swimming team trying to cope at the very hotel where we the Faroese were also staying. A terrible tragedy unleashing a furious first 50 meters, and a strong second half determined to win for his country. Now it turns out that this swim hit both favorite Kosuke Kitajima and Hugues Duboscq really hard, almost into doubting that they could swim at all. “I don’t know how…

USA Triathlon is creating a task force to determine if anything more can be done to prevent deaths such as those 5 that occurred at recent races in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Louisville, Ky. According to the research published last year in The Journal of American Medicine, there were 14 deaths among the almost 960,000 participants in U.S. triathlons between 2006 and mid-September 2008, a rate of 1.5 deaths per 100,000 participants. Of the 14 deaths, all but one occurred in the swim portion. Read The Washington Post

A good one here, Surinamese Anthony Nesty reliving the experience of winning 100 butterfly Olympic gold in 1988. It was a true sensation, Nesty almost not being mentioned before after the swim, and Matt Biondi really throwing it away with one of the longest glides to the finish in Olympic history.

According to a study by USA Swimming, 60 to 70 percent of African-American and Hispanic children don’t know how to swim. Cullen Jones and USA Swimming are trying to do something about that, with the Make a Splash campaign. From NBCMiami.com via Diversity in Aquatics.

The Brits celebrated the completion of the London 2012 Aquatics Centre already in July, with one year to go until til London 2012 Olympics. The pictures are certainly impressive, but I won’t rest easy until there are some Omega OSB11 starting blocks at each end :-) Here is Tom Daley performing the first official dive. Classy comment from Olympic medalist Leon Taylor: “As Tom were saying, he’s so exciting … so excited to dive here”. Later there was this fun race with Olympic celebrities like Duncan Goodhew and Mark Foster. A bit of a mess with mixed strokes, ages and…

Luna the orca certainly seems to know how to imitate an outboard motor engine. Or as someone comments on YouTube: “I can make horribly – annoying sounds too!”

Swim Lanka is a post-tsunami charity established to promote swimming in Sri Lanka, its initial aim to give coastal children the chance to overcome their fear of water and learn to swim. Many lives lost in the tsunami would have been saved if everyone had been able to swim. Most don’t know how. Read vcasa.net and the BBC. (If video is blocked here above, then try watching directly on 5min.com)

Olympic gold medalist Ryk Neethling’s swimming academy in Garsfontein, Pretoria has been broken into and equipment to the value of R50,000 (6,300 USD) stolen. Read iolnews. “It is very sad to me. You try so hard to make a difference in your country. Then it is one step forward and two steps back,” Neethling told Beeld newspaper. Here is a SwimmingWorld TV segment with Neethling from March 2010

A British man lost parts of both legs when he was attacked by a great white shark Wednesday after he ignored warnings and went swimming at a Cape Town, South Africa, beach. He apparently made it back toward his shore and then was pulled from the water by a bystander, right leg bitten off above the knee and the left one below the knee. The unmarried accountant is now fighting for his life according to the International Business Times, Peta probably still really proud of their ‘payback’ campaign. Via msnbc.com.

Two calculators added under our brand new section ‘Tools’, which hopefully in time will turn into some kind of swim tool repository. I use the very good (free) service of www.editgrid.com, which is almost ‘Excel on the web’.