Swimmer's Daily

  • The Sacramento Police Department beat out six groups of Grant High School students in a friendly swim relay race on Oct. 23 at the school’s new pool.

    Officers who patrol the Del Paso Heights area near the school split up into five teams to take on the Grant High School Junior ROTC, student government, swim team and other student organizations, with the police taking the top spot and the Grant swim team taking second and third place.

    Officers swam in full uniform and bare feet (save one officer, who wore socks), while students wore swimsuits.

    See The Sacramento Bee

  • Of the ten sportsmen and women who received the most media coverage between October 1st last year and September 30th this year, five were men and five were women, according to fresh statistics.

    Perhaps unsurprisingly, Zlatan Ibrahimovic topped the list. A whopping 35,619 articles were written about the footballer last year according to the figures compiled by media analysts Retriever and newswire TT.

    He was followed by national men’s football team manager Janne Andersson (with a somewhat more modest 19,639 articles), popular skier Charlotte Kalla, golfer Henrik Stenson, record-breaking swimmer Sarah Sjöström, ex-women’s football manager Pia Sundhage, footballer Lotta Schelin, ice hockey star Henrik Lundqvist, Nordic skier Stina Nilsson and footballer Victor Nilsson Lindelöf.

    Read The Local

    Photo by oskarlin

  • A British diver separated from his boat off the coast of Australia has said he was lucky to be alive after being forced to swim miles back to shore – shadowed by a large tiger shark.

    The spear fisherman, John Craig, was underwater off Western Australia state Friday when his boat was swept away due to engine problems and strong currents.

    He told the BBC that sharks gravitated towards him because stress had raised his heart rate.

    Read The Telegraph

  • Yusra Mardini’s incredible story has taken another turn, as the Syrian refugee and Olympic swimmer recently signed an endorsement deal with Under Armour.

    “I shouldn’t be alive today,” Mardini says in a promotional video released by Under Armour. “I should have been one of the many faceless refugees who died along the way. But I am here. Because I kept moving.”

    Read Sports Illustrated

  • In California, bicycles are not allowed in swimming pools. In Delaware, it’s illegal to consume perfume. These are among the bizarre and obscure laws that have made their way into America’s state and local legislation and that photographer Olivia Locher chose to document in her latest collection of photographs, “I Fought the Law.”

    Locher began the project after a friend told her that it’s illegal in Alabama to have an ice cream cone in your back pocket. “That idea, it kept haunting me for many months,” she said from New York City’s Steven Kasher Gallery, where the exhibition is now on display. I got really interested in the legal aspects of the laws and how it affects our everyday lives.”

    See PBS News Hour

    Photo by boltron-

  • A friendly kayaker saved the life of a very lost iguana he found swimming four miles out to sea.

    The fisherman, who runs YouTube channel Key West Kayak Fishing, said it was “pretty crazy to see the guy so far out”.

    He was on a fishing trip off the Florida Keys archipelago when he bumped into the struggling reptile who gratefully hopped onto his kayak.

    See The Telegraph

  • Papa Massata Diack, the man accused of being at the heart of the corruption racket to fix the bidding for Tokyo to win the 2020 Olympics, is reported to have sent an email on the day of the vote warning of the need to “lock” African votes to prevent them going to Madrid instead.

    According to the French newspaper Le Monde, Diack emailed his father Lamine, an influential figure in the International Olympic Committee, to warn him: “Information coming from your African colleague, it seems that Sheikh Ahmad is doing all he can to get the Africans to vote for Madrid! We need to lock this before the pause.”

    The letter, which was sent on 7 September, 2013, hours before Tokyo was awarded the Games, was swiftly responded to by Lamine Diack, who told his son: “We can talk about it after the session.”

    Last year the Guardian revealed that a £1m payment from the Tokyo bid team to a Black Tidings bank account linked to Massata Diack was made during Japan’s successful race to host the 2020 Games, and the bidding process for both the 2016 and 2020 Olympics remain under investigation by French police.

    Lawyers for Lamine Diack, who is currently awaiting trial in France for corruption offences committed while he was head of the IAAF, athletics’ governing body, said their client would “reserve his declarations to the justice, before talking to the press” and that he is “absolutely innocent, concerning the offences he is accused of”.

    Meanwhile Massata Diack, who remains on the run from Interpol in Senegal after being charged with a number of corruption offences by French police, told Le Monde: “As usual, good luck for your article and we will maybe meet at Tokyo in 2020 for an exclusive interview!”

    Read The Guardian

  • The Kremlin accused the U.S. government on Friday of pushing for Russia’s exclusion from the Olympics.

    A day after Russian President Vladimir Putin said the IOC was coming under pressure from the U.S., his spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Putin meant “state (structures), including through social and non-government organizations.”

    Putin said the effort aimed to ensure Russia was either barred from next year’s Winter Olympics entirely or forced to compete under a neutral flag.

    In televised comments on Thursday, Putin said the IOC depended on sponsorship income “and in turn clear signals are being given to these sponsors by certain American bodies. We aren’t simply guessing about this, we know about it.”

    Read USA Today

    Photo by theglobalpanorama

  • According to the most decorated Olympian in history, he’s done competing.
    After winning five golds and a silver at Rio 2016, Michael Phelps hung up his suit and moved onto the second stage of his career.
    That second stage includes many projects. He runs his foundation, is starting a swimwear line, he’s raising a family, and most recently, he started working with Colgate on water conservation campaign called “Save Water.”

    https://youtu.be/vMXE5RpkrEQ