Swimmer's Daily

  • Sociology professor Ellis Cashmore believes sport should adapt to accept transgender athletes and embrace inclusivity – but Olympic medal winner Sharron Davies says it’ll create an unequal playing field.

  • In September, in the midst of major political campaigning in Iraqi Kurdistan for an independence referendum, Waterkeepers Iraq was quietly conducting a swimming expedition to promote clean water. With seven water advocates and a small staff from a local television station on board, three swimmers completed the first ever attempt to swim the entire distance of Dukan Lake.

    The expedition started at Darbandy Ranya in the extreme northeast of the Dukan Reservoir in the northern province of Sulaimaniyah, Kurdistan, Iraq. On the evening of September 19, the team traveled by boat across the waters of the vast lake formed by the Dukan hydroelectric dam. It took three hours to trace the path they would begin swimming the next day—a swim that would ultimately take more than 35 hours to complete.

    The television staff accompanying the expedition was from KurdSat TV. They covered the story as part of a 45-minute documentary about the efforts of Iraq Upper Tigris Waterkeeper Nabil Musa to promote swimmable, drinkable, fishable waters in Iraqi Kurdistan. No one, not even Nabil who has been doing long distance swims on the lake since 2012, had ever attempted the entire distance of 39 kilometers—24.2 miles—north to south.

  • The summer of 2018 wasn’t as successful as for Caeleb Dressel as he had hoped, while fellow sprinter Michael Andrew racked up win after win at the Phillips 66 National Championships.

    That’s all in the past now, and Dressel has returned to training, hungry for this summer’s FINA World Championships. In the meantime, Andrew has had continued success at the TYR Pro Swim Series in Knoxville.

    “Off the Blocks,” Season 2 follows Dressel, Andrew and the other top USA Swimming National Team members as they compete in the TYR Pro Swim Series and prepare for the biggest competitions of the season, including the 2019 Open Water National Championships and the 2019 FINA World Championships.

  • After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami destroyed the previous Moken settlement in Thailand’s Andaman Sea, Hook says, people were able to recover some belongings. This time, when fire broke out on February 3 this year, nothing was left.

    Now the community fears for the future as the authorities begin to reconstruct the village in Au Bon Yai bay, in its original design, using an unsafe housing model consisting of highly flammable structures, densely packed together. And it has reignited a row about the Moken’s rights to their ancestral lands.

    Read South China Morning Post

  • https://youtu.be/uRrUKWcahz0

  • Hundreds take a swim to raise money for blindness

  • The Nakifeo swimming academy needs up to 10 million shillings to spread their junior development program to all regions of the country. The academy is currently holding development events in Nairobi, Kiambu and Nakuru only.

  • The former swimmer stressed she was not transphobic but argued that transgender athletes had an unfair advantage.

  • A grandma is making waves online after a series of viral photos show her getting swept out to sea while sitting on an iceberg. She had sat on the “ice throne” to pose for a photo when the ice got carried away.

    ABC News reports that Judith Streng was visiting Iceland’s Diamond Beach in Jökulsárlón with her son Rod when she noticed the throne-like formation. But as she posed on the iceberg while Rod snapped a photo, a wave crashed onto the beach and pulled the iceberg into the ocean with Judith still on it.

    “When I got on it, it started to totter and a wave was coming in,” Streng tells ABC News. “A very large wave came in and kind of made the throne kind of rock, and I could tell that I was slipping off.”

    See Petapixel