Swimmer's Daily

  • Meet Blake Pieroni, a member of your USA Swimming 2016 Olympic Team representing the stars and stripes in Rio. Blake will be competing in the 4x100m men’s freestyle relay.

  • Everything you need to know about Olympic Marathon Swimming.

    A 10km race in open-water, this is another adventure sport. It entered the Olympic Games at Beijing 2008.

    Watch more Marathon Swimming: http://bit.ly/2a0pV44

  • The legal battle to compete in next month’s Olympics has begun as Russian swimmer Yulia Efimova was the first to appeal her exclusion from the Rio Games by swimming body FINA, acting on criteria set out by the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

    The IOC declined to impose a blanket ban on Russian competitors over state-run doping, a decision which was met with fierce criticism elsewhere with Olympic chiefs branded “spineless”.

    In one of the most momentous moves in its long, chequered history, the IOC said it was up to each international sports federation to decide if Russians could take part in Rio.

    Swimming governing body FINA announced a ban on seven Russian swimmers, making it the first international federation to impose sanctions in light of the IOC decision.

    Vladimir Morozov and Nikita Lobintsev, both 4x100m freestyle bronze-medal winners with the Russian team at the 2012 Olympics, and Efimova, another 2012 Olympic bronze medallist, were among the seven banned.

    Efimova, 24, a four-time world breaststroke champion, whose provisional ban for testing positive for meldonium was overturned by FINA in May, will appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), her agent Andrei Mitkov told R-Sport.

    Read ABC News

  • Simone Manuel is heading in to her first Olympics next month in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and based on her nickname, it was her destiny.

    Before the 19-year-old was a Stanford University student preparing for her first Olympics, she was on a club swim team, where one of the parents of a fellow swimmer nicknamed her “Swimone”.

    “I think one time she was saying like, ‘Simone swims…’, ‘Swim, Simone.’ Then when she said it, like, it all came together and she was like, ’Swimone!’ she tells Us Weekly of the fateful naming. “So after that a lot of people have called me Swimone!”

    Read US

  • Being a champion doesn’t mean winning every race. It’s also about character, bouncing back from setbacks, and continuing to move toward your goal. Natalie Coughlin, 33, is a 12-time Olympic medalist, three of them gold, but didn’t make the cut for the Rio Olympic Games in August.

    “I’m bummed I’m not going to Rio, but it is what it is,” Coughlin said recently, adding that she is not using the word “retiring.” “So, I’ve always approached my goals with the intensity of controlling what I can control and letting everything else go. And then if I stumble or if I don’t achieve that goal, I evaluate what happened, what could I have done better and then move forward.”

    Read Los Angeles Times

  • Have you always wanted to go head-to-head with an Olympian? Some lucky Pacific Fair shoppers had a go against swimmer and 2016 Australian Olympic Team Coin Program Ambassador Thomas Fraser-Holmes in a game of heads or tails. Tom joined the Mint to present this exciting new collection, seeing a coin transform into a medal in an instant.

  • FINA acknowledges and supports the IOC’s position in respect of the participation of clean Russian athletes to the Olympic Games in Rio.

    The WADA Independent Person (“McLaren”) report has shown that anti-doping rules, i.e. the FINA Doping Control (DC) Rules and the WADA Code were not correctly implemented in Russia, i.e. within the jurisdiction of the Russian Swimming Federation.

    The exact implication for the Russian Swimming Federation is still to be clarified. For this purpose, the matter has been forwarded to an ad hoc commission, which will have to investigate. The Commission will notably have to consider any further information to be received from the continuing IP investigation.

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  • That day, Phelps swam the fasted 100-meter butterfly in the history of the 4×100 medley race. He swam past the Japanese and Australian swimmers like they had anchors attached to their Speedos. He turned a half-second deficit into a full-second lead by the time he touched the wall, which ought to be a physical and mathematical impossibility. It was as magnificent a call to excellence as you ever will see, custom-built for the Olympics.

    And even that wasn’t the best part.

    The best part happened next, after Phelps climbed out of the pool as he joined two other members of that relay — Brendan Hansen and Aaron Piersol — on the pool’s deck and started cheering madly, rabidly, for Jason Lezak, finishing off the 100-meter freestyle portion of the race. This was an especially relevant moment for a couple of reasons.

    Earlier in the meet, it was Lezak who had heroically kept alive Phelps’ quest to win eight gold medals when, in the anchor leg of the 4×100 relay, he had overcome Frenchman Alain Bernard — who had a half-body-length lead — and wound up beating him by eight-hundredths of a second. At the time, it seemed impossible that any race in any sport could be decided by that — by 0.008.

    Except Phelps had won his seventh gold medal by 0.001, somehow getting his fingernail to the wall ahead of U.S.-born Serbian Milorad Cavic. Phelps would talk about how Lezak had inspired him, had proven, again, that as long as the wall beckons it’s there for you. There were protests aplenty after that race, but it was Cavic, in a stunning display of sportsmanship, who had put the matter to rest on his blog.

    “People,” he wrote, “this is the greatest moment of my life. If you ask me, it should be accepted and we should move on. I’ve accepted defeat, and there’s nothing wrong with losing to the greatest swimmer there has ever been.”

    And so it was that the greatest swimmer that ever has been was on the deck at The Cube, looking like any 11-year-old at any local swim meet anywhere in the world, screaming himself hoarse, cheering not for his own impending immortality, but for a teammate who already had lent him a forever hand. When Lezak finished up — another world record time, some 1.34 seconds faster than any American team ever had swam that race — Phelps was lost in a four-man scrum of joy.

    Part of history. But part of a team most of all.

    Read The New York Post

    Photo by marcopako 