Swimmer's Daily

  • Grant Hackett’s most successful discipline was the 1.500m Freestyle Swimming. “The Giant from Australia” took his first gold medal in this discipline on home soil, at the FINA World Championships in Perth 1998 – and a lot more should follow. Watch how Hackett took his final Gold Medal at the 2005 Championships in Montreal!

  • So, for the new study, which was published in November in Frontiers in Physiology, researchers at the University of Guelph in Canada and other institutions set out to map the structure and function of elite swimmers’ and runners’ hearts.

    The researchers focused on world-class performers because those athletes would have been running or swimming strenuously for years, presumably exaggerating any differential effects of their training, the researchers reasoned.

    Eventually they recruited 16 national-team runners and another 16 comparable swimmers, male and female, some of them sprinters and others distance specialists.

    They asked the athletes to visit the exercise lab after not exercising for 12 hours and then, when on site, to lie quietly. They checked heart rates and blood pressures and finally examined the athletes’ hearts with echocardiograms, which show both the structure and functioning of the organ.

    It turned out, to no one’s surprise, that the athletes, whether runners or swimmers, enjoyed enviable heart health. Their heart rates hovered around 50 beats per minute, with the runners’ rates slightly lower than the swimmers’. But all of the athletes’ heart rates were much lower than is typical for sedentary people, signifying that their hearts were robust.

    The athletes also had relatively large, efficient left ventricles, their echocardiograms showed.

    But there were interesting if small differences between the swimmers and runners, the researchers found. While all of the athletes’ left ventricles filled with blood earlier than average and untwisted more quickly during each heartbeat, those desirable changes were amplified in the runners. Their ventricles filled even earlier and untwisted more emphatically than the swimmers’ hearts did.

    Read The New York Times

  • A swimming pool in the Anacostia River? An environmental study shows the idea is achievable.

    The Anacostia Waterfront Trust [AWT], DC Department of Energy and Environment [DOEE] and SmithGroup, an architectural engineering firm, all contributed to a study that assessed the feasibility of a river swimming pool project.

    Photo by cabin in the hood

  • Today marks the 100-day countdown to the FINA World Championships which will take place in Gwangju this summer. On this occasion, the mayor of the city of Gwangju, the mayor of the city of Yeosu and Korea’s most decorated swimmer and Gwangju 2019 ambassador, Park Tae Hwan, gathered to celebrate this important milestone for the Organising Committee, for Gwangju and for Korea.

    (more…)

  • The Great Blue Hole, a giant ocean sinkhole off the coast of Belize, is a beautiful and mysterious sight. Now, researchers working on an expedition of the sinkhole have released the first 3D maps of its interior and a minidocumentary on their submarine trip, including how they found mysterious marks and the bodies of long-lost divers at the bottom of the chasm. […]

    “There were…these odd tracks, crisscrossing circles right around the center of the hole with no indication of what had made them. Mostly it was quiet and dark down there,” Bergman added. “We also encountered the resting place for two of the divers who’ve been lost in the hole. We notified the local authorities, and everyone agreed to leave them undisturbed. They are at peace.”

    See geek.com

    https://youtu.be/OqdGaamwg2Q

    Photo by 2ilorg

  • UCLA’s Maria Polyakova named the Pac-12 Women’s Diver of the Year for the second time of her career after winning two Pac-12 crowns at the conference championships. The senior won the 1-meter (335.70) and 3-meter (350.70) springboards for her third and fourth career titles at the championships to earn Pac-12 Diver of the Meet, as voted on by the league coaches. Polyakova became the first-ever UCLA diver to win an individual NCAA Championship after taking home the 3-meter crown (396.00) for the program’s first individual title since Annette Salmeen won the 200-yard butterfly in 1996.

  • Cal’s Abbey Weitzeil was named the 2019 Pac-12 Women’s Swimmer of the Year after winning three individual events and contributing to four relay victories at the conference championships where she earned Pac-12 Swimmer of the Meet honors. She set a Cal and Pac-12 meet record in the 100-yard freestyle touching in at 46.35 and later won the 200 free with a personal-best time of 1:41.97. At the NCAA Women’s Swimming and Diving Championships, Weitzeil won an individual NCAA title, broke three NCAA records and topped the podium in four relay events to help California earn a runner-up finish for the third-consecutive year.

  • Hear from Coach Mandy Commons-DiSalle and members of the Bearcats’ swimming and diving team as they look back on the season and talk about being back to back men’s swimming and diving champions.

  • Cal’s Terri McKeever named the Pac-12 Women’s Swimming Coach of the Year for the first time since 2015 and collects her eighth career award to tie Arizona’s Frank Busch for the most awards by a coach in Pac-12 history (1999, 2002, 2009, 2011-2013, 2015, 2019). McKeever led California to its third consecutive runner-up finish at the NCAA Women’s Swimming and Diving Championships, where she was named CSCAA Coach of the Year. With McKeever at the helm of the Cal women’s swimming program, student-athletes have been named Pac-12 Swimmer of the Year nine times and National Swimmer of the Year on eight occasions.