Swimmer's Daily

  • Whistleblowers have been urged to come forward to help the fight against doping after fresh allegations of Russian wrongdoing have surfaced, this time in swimming.

    According to reports in the Times and Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, two senior Russian anti-doping officials offered to stop testing Russian swimmers for money in the buildup to London 2012.

    The former head of Russia’s anti-doping agency Nikita Kamaev and the director of the Moscow anti-doping laboratory, Grigory Rodchenkov, are alleged to have asked the national swimming federation for three million roubles (currently £32,200) a year to remove “two or three leading swimmers” from the testing group.

    This offer, which the swimming federation declined, is reported to have been delivered over two meetings in autumn 2011.

    A statement from swimming’s world governing body Fina read: “These are very serious allegations and we urge anyone with relevant evidence to bring it forward to Fina so that we can share with all appropriate authorities and take immediate disciplinary action if required.

    “Fina is monitoring all developments in the world’s fight against cheating and doping in sport and is taking decisive action to protect the majority of our athletes who are clean.”

    Read The Guardian

    In other news …

    “All these speculations have an impact on sportsmen who have nothing to do with doping and are open to all checks within the framework of the laws in force,” Russia’s R-Sport news agency quoted swimming federation chief Vladimir Salnikov as saying.

    “It is absurd and a provocation on the day of an important decision for Russian sport,” he said.

    Read Reuters

  • A recently released transcript is offering a window into the mindset of a California judge who sentenced former Stanford University swimmer Brock Turner to jail for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman.

    Turner faced a maximum sentence of 14 years, but Judge Aaron Persky of Santa Clara Superior Court sentenced him instead to six months. Prosecutors had asked for six years in prison. The controversial decision by Persky sparked outrage nationwide.

    In the sentencing transcripts from the June 2 hearing, defense attorney Mike Armstrong said Turner “has never denied” digitally penetrating the woman but “in his drunken state, he remembered consent.”

    The judge appears to believe Turner, 20, as he explains his sentencing decision by saying, “I mean, I take him at his word that, subjectively, that’s his version of events. The jury, obviously, found it not to be the sequence of events.”

    While clearly saying “it’s not an excuse,” Persky says Turner’s legal intoxication is “a factor that, when trying to assess moral culpability in this situation, is mitigating.”

    Read CNN

  • Olympians are incredible athletes. There’s no question about that.

    But how about when they try their athleticism in another sport? They can appear to be just a regular Joe Schmoe who doesn’t know what they’re doing.

    In an ad campaign for Milk Life, some Olympic medalists switched sports. In one video, swimmer Elizabeth Beisel met rugby player Perry Baker in the pool. Then they ran some drills on the pitch.

    https://youtu.be/rxLpr3pbVJ4

    Beisel won two medals at the 2012 Olympics: silver in the 400 IM and bronze in the 200 backstroke. Baker, meanwhile, is set to make his Olympic debut. He is one of the stars of the U.S. rugby sevens team, a sport which will make its Olympic debut in Rio (15-a-side rugby was last in the Olympics in 1924).

    In another video, swimmer Caitlin Leverenz, who won 200 IM bronze in London, taught beach volleyball player Jen Kessy, who took silver in London, some swimming technique. And Kessy put Leverenz through some drills on the sand.

    https://youtu.be/jaNk7tOwO_A

    See NBC Sports

  • Newport News mother tells 8News sister station WAVY that her young child developed a serious bacterial infection after swimming at a local beach.

  • A new study in the journal Current Biology shows that physical exercise after learning improves memory and memory traces, but only if the exercise is done in a specific time window and not immediately after learning.

    “It shows that we can improve memory consolidation by doing sports after learning,” said study corresponding author Dr. Guillén Fernández, from the Radboud University Medical Center, the Netherlands.

    In the study, Dr. Fernández and co-authors tested the effects of a single session of physical exercise after learning on memory consolidation and long-term memory.

    “Seventy-two participants were randomly assigned to one of three age- and gender-matched groups; all learned 90 picture-location associations over a period of approximately 40 min,” the scientists said.

    “In each group, half of the participants started at 9 a.m. and half at 12 p.m. to control for time-of-day effects.”

    “Following a baseline cued recall test, participants in the immediate exercise (IE) group performed a 35-min interval training on an ergometer at an intensity of up to 80% of their maximum heart rate.”

    “IE participants subsequently moved to a separate quiet environment for a three-hr delay period, where they watched nature documentaries, before returning to the exercise lab for a control session. This control session did not involve exercise but used the same context otherwise.”

    “For the delayed exercise (DE) group, the protocol was identical but with the order of the exercise and control session reversed; for the no exercise (NE) group, both sessions before and after the delay period were control sessions.”

    Participants returned to the lab 48 hr after initial encoding and performed a second recall test in the magnetic resonance (MR) scanner.

    The scientists found that those who exercised four hours after their learning session retained the information better two days later than those who exercised either immediately or not at all.

    Read sci-news.com

  • WOWT 6 News Live at 5

  • Creatures as small as a bottle cap moving through the waters off New Jersey sent a swimmer to the hospital for two days and sparked warnings to beachgoers looking to celebrate the summer on the shore.

    https://youtu.be/n5hDGQIzcyg

  • Rami Anis braved the bombs of Aleppo, then was forced to leave his Syrian home for Turkey five years ago — all the while refusing to give up on an elusive dream of swimming in the Olympics.

    He trained at the prestigious Galatasaray sports club in Istanbul, putting in lap after lap after lap, month after month. But soon, frustration set in because he was a refugee. That short window when a good athlete can truly become elite was closing fast. And he knew it.

    “I could not swim for the club. I was just training without taking part. All the while, the war was lasting longer. And I was losing my best years as an athlete,” he said in an interview with the Associated Press.

    So last year, at age 24 already, he took a different dive into the water, and crossed on a rubber boat from Turkey into Greece — a stretch of Aegean Sea that has become the tomb of all too many refugees — before setting off a 2,000-mile (3,000 kilometers) trek through the Balkans and onwards to Germany and eventually Belgium.

    Now, as part of the first official refugee team at the Games, Anis will be going to Rio — having lost some of his edge and many illusions along the way. Still, he clings to one.

    “I wish from my heart that there will be no more refugees and we can go back and participate for our country,” Anis said.

    Read NBC Olympics

  • Members of the Stanford University women’s swim team are saying they were not surprised by Brock Turner’s arrest, according to a report.

    One swimmer was quoted as calling Turner “very, very odd” and claims he made crude comments to her teammates about their bodies, according to InTouch Magazine.

    “Brock’s arrest wasn’t surprising to anyone on the team,” one woman told the magazine.

    Turner, 20, was a member of the Stanford men’s team until his rape conviction earlier this month, when he was removed from the team. He has also been banned for life by USA Swimming.

    Meanwhile, the powerful letter written by Brock’s unidentified 23-year-old victim was read aloud in congress Wednesday.

    An hour passed as the 19 members of congress, Democrats and Republicans, took turns reading the entire 7,000 word plea.

    Turner got just six months after being convicted of sexual assault. He’s expected to be released three months early, on September 2. The sentence has led to outrage.

    See Inside Edition