Swimmer's Daily

  • 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 

  • Greek 100 meters butterfly champion Kristel Vourna has spoken of her “relief and joy” after an unlikely U-turn by the World Swimming Federation (FINA) following an initial blunder which means she can participate in next month’s Rio Olympics.

    The 24-year-old, who was initially told by FINA two weeks ago that she had qualified for the Games after making the B standard time, was left devastated days later when the ruling body said her invitation was down to an administrative error.

    According to FINA regulations, in order for two athletes from the same country to participate in the same event both must have posted A standard times.

    This was not the case for Vourna, who was behind compatriot Anna Doundounaki, and FINA retracted her invitation having realized its mistake.

    But following discussions between the Greek swimming federation (KOE), the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and FINA, Vourna has been reinstated.

    “It’s been a very strange couple of weeks and I’ve been through all kinds of emotions, but now the most strongest ones are relief and joy that I’m going to Rio,” Vourna told Reuters.

    Read Reuters

  • With seven gold medals, American swimmer Mark Spitz set the record in 1972 for most wins in a single Olympic Games. Thirty-six years later, at the Beijing Summer Olympic Games, another American swimmer, Michael Phelps, broke Mark’s record when he took home eight.

  • In 2008, at age 41, Dara Torres became the oldest U.S. swimmer to compete in the Olympic Games. Heartbreakingly, she fell one one-hundredth of a second short of winning the gold medal.

  • A new look at a fun Team USA tradition! The signing of the Olympic flags.

  • Among the countless pieces of high-performance gear the U.S. swim team is schlepping to the Rio Olympics, the most important may be these: blackout curtains, fitted sheets, and pillows from home.

    Even as worries mount about security, terrorism, and a global health epidemic, the fear keeping U.S. swimming officials awake at night is the possibility that their star athletes won’t be able to get enough sleep.

    The issue is a new schedule, driven by the desire to feature swimming on prime-time television broadcasts, that will start finals races at 10 p.m. and therefore keep some swimmers at the pool well past midnight. That means athletes will be returning to their beds in the early morning hours, and will need to be deep in REM sleep when the rest of the Olympic Village roars to life.

    In response, the U.S. team has developed a new protocol it calls LNATP: Late Night at the Pool.

    “If our athletes don’t sleep, they’re not going to perform,” Lindsay Mintenko, the swim team’s managing director. “A lot more emphasis has been put on that part of it because of the schedule.”

    The swim team won 31 medals at the London Olympics in 2012, the most of any sport and nearly 30% of the U.S. team’s medal haul. The chance to feature Michael Phelps, Ryan Lochte and Katie Ledecky when television viewership is highest is the main reason for the schedule shift, even if it hasn’t been popular in the swimming community—Australia’s head coach Jacco Verhaeren last year called the move “irresponsible.”

    All U.S. swimmers will be given blackout curtains in Rio, and they’ve been issued eye masks and earplugs with instructions to practice with them so they don’t snooze through an alarm on a race day.

    USA Swimming officials have told athletes to take a pillow from home for familiarity, and are bringing entire sets of bedsheets despite the fact that the Rio rooms already have them.

    “Honestly, one of the biggest concerns I get from athletes, in most games I’ve been a part of: They don’t have fitted sheets,” says Mintenko, who won gold medals as a swimmer at the 2000 and 2004 games as Lindsay Benko. “It’s very uncomfortable for them not to be in fitted sheets.”

    Read The Wall Street Journal

     

  • With Peaty tipped to become his country’s first male champion in the Olympic pool since Adrian Moorhouse won the 100m breaststroke in Seoul in 1988, one can imagine the rule has been sorely tested.

    At London 2012, the British men took only one medal — a silver for Michael Jamieson in 200m breaststroke. In 2008 in Beijing, when Rebecca Adlington struck gold twice, the only men’s medal was in the open water.

    Peaty was not even born the last time a British man triumphed in the Olympic pool, although he has seen the 1988 race on video, and does not feel any particular burden of expectation.

    Indeed, as he showed in Kazan where he beat South Africa’s Olympic 100m champion Cameron van der Burgh in both the breaststroke sprints, he thrives on pressure.

    “I’m going in as number one but what’s the worst that can happen? It’s not like someone’s holding a gun at the end of the lane. I’ve got nothing to lose. I’m just going to give it a good go,” he told reporters.

    “I’m going in to my first Olympics whereas people I’m racing are going into their third and fourth and probably last Olympics. So there’s more pressure on them to perform.

    “I’ve still got a whole future ahead of me. I am not even the Olympic champ.”

    Read Reuters

  • Four years ago at the London 2012 Olympic Games, Chad le Clos stunned the world when he beat Michael Phelps to an Olympic gold medal in the 200m butterfly. His father Bert, Chad’s best friend and mentor, captured hearts all over the planet with his emotional response to Chad’s victory on the BBC.

  • That night, and during the 16 days of competition that followed before the Spice Girls closed the show by roaring around the stadium perched on the top of London taxis, it all felt great. A friend of mine was a Games Maker and had one of the best times of his life, but he identified a dissonance buried beneath the euphoria. “In a sense, it was volunteering for an organisation that takes hundreds of millions of pounds from broadcasting organisations,” he said this week. “I mean, would you volunteer for Amazon?”

    Eventually other dissonances emerged, ranging from the relatively trivial – a legal dispute, settled out of court, over the creative inspiration for the cauldron – to the great thundering falsehood employed to persuade a sceptical British public that the whole enterprise was worth the vast expense: the claim, endlessly repeated by Sebastian Coe and others, that hosting the Olympics would ensure a legacy of physical health for future generations.

    So where are we now? With a plague of obesity, diabetes and other symptoms of ill health among young people, exacerbated by Michael Gove’s destruction of the School Sports Partnership. That vile decision deprived children at state schools of probably the most effective scheme devised to guarantee them physical exercise, with only the half-baked Schools Games and an unsatisfactory primary schools scheme offered in compensation. And now this week’s warning from Public Health England that a sharp rise in the level of vitamin D deficiency – the sunlight vitamin – among children has led to a resurgence in infant rickets, a condition associated with Victorian slums.

    To watch the opening ceremony unfold all over again, and to listen to the recollections of the participants, was to be reminded that sport can indeed sometimes provide a good example to wider society. “We all felt so excited to be part of something so much bigger than us,” one volunteer performer said, remembering the secret rehearsals at a disused Ford plant in Dagenham. Another spoke of being tempted to withdraw, but changing her mind because it would mean letting people down. Those are the life lessons sport can offer.

    In terms of real legacy, however, it was all a gigantic waste of time and money. Less than a year ago, the Children’s Society reported on the high levels ofunhappiness shown by English schoolchildren. In a survey of 53,000 children aged 10 to 12 in 15 countries, including Ethiopia, Germany, Israel, Estonia, Turkey, South Africa, Poland, and Algeria, English children came next to bottom in the happiness index, ahead only of South Korea. “We are one of the richest countries in the world and yet the happiness of our children is at rock bottom,” the charity’s chief executive said. “They are unhappy at school and are struggling with issues around their appearance and self-confidence.”

    At around the same time, researchers at Essex University tested 300 children of similar age and discovered plummeting levels of physical fitness. “It has got to the stage now that if we took the least fit child from a class of 30 we tested in 1998, they would be one of the five fittest children in a class of the same age today,” Dr Gavin Sandercock, the lead researcher, said. “These are the children who had free swimming taken away, who lived through the demolition of the Schools Sports Partnerships and lost the five-hour offer of PE.”

    These are issues that regular physical exercise – whether actual competitive sport or the “Indian dancing” derided by David Cameron while defending Gove’s axing of the SSP – could have addressed, had Coe’s pledge actually meant anything.

    Read The Guardian

    Photo by Si B