Swimmer's Daily

  • Dairy cows have been blamed for the high E. coli levels which have forced the closure of popular Patea River swimming holes in Stratford for more than a month.

  • Goldfish Swim School, a Michigan-based company founded by Chris and Jenny McCuiston in 2006 in Birmingham, is a fast-growing enterprise that aims to become one of the largest swim-school franchisers in America.

    It’s also part of a growing national trend: private, year-round swim schools for young children.

    See Detroit Free Press

  • In a paper published Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, scientists report that a 16-year-old orca named Wikie was able to copy a variety of new sounds on command. The study joins a growing body of research illustrating the deep importance of social learning for killer whales.

    “We wanted to study vocal imitation because it’s a hallmark of human spoken language, which is in turn important for human cultural evolution,” said José Zamorano-Abramson, who led the study as a postdoctoral researcher at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. “We are interested in the possibility that other species also have cultural processes.”

    Read The New York Times via Neatorama

  • Prior to the late 1960’s almost no swimmer wore goggles in either practice or competition. Those that did use them wore the large, triangular shaped rubber goggles that we can often see in old photos of swimmers crossing the English Channel. The challenges with those big rubber goggles were that they made swimmers see double, so the swimmer would have to close one eye to avoid confusion. They were also bulky, often leaked and caused more drag for the swimmer.

    Gertrude Ederle traverse la Manche (août 1926). By Le Miroir des sports – Le Miroir des sports, 11 août 1926, Public Domain, Link

    Swimmers from that era will recall the painful tears being shed after goggle-less practices from the toxicity of chlorine to the corneas. For some of us, that was also a great excuse for not doing homework. Without using goggles, we also struggled to judge the turns correctly from the blurred vision.

    In the summer of 1965, a swimmer in Anaheim, California at the Sammy Lee Swim School by the name of Peter Frawley (brother of NCAA 50 free champion from USC, Dan Frawley), saw a small add in the back of a skin diving magazine from the Melbourne Sports Depot in Australia selling small plastic goggles. They were being marketed to pearl divers.

    Peter ordered a box of a dozen goggles for 40 cents apiece and when they arrived in Anaheim weeks later, he sold some of them to his team mates at Sammy Lee for 80 cents. I was one of first to purchase a pair.

    Read more on The Race Club

  • Strongman Swimming documents Ross Edgley’s incredible attempt to swim 40km with a 100lb tree tied to him between the Caribbean islands of St Lucia and Martinique.

  • This guy is not just a casual visitor to the swimming pool. He is the champion of Europe on short water at a distance of 1.5 thousand meters freestyle. In 2017, athletes from the city of Rivne won many well-deserved rewards. Among them are a silver medal at the World Championship in Budapest and the three medals at the Universiade in Taipei. Thanks to the natural-born talent and hard work, this 21-year-old Ukrainian became one of the leaders in the sport of world swimming. Meet the talented and charming Mykhailo Romanchuk, the hero of this episode of ‘World of Sports’!

  • We can become a like a superconductor to our experiences. Without resistance there is no pain and we start to live in the flow, enjoying everything that life brings our way.

  • Kiki Bosch is an adventurer, biohacker and freediver who dives in freezing cold water all over the world.