Swimmer's Daily

  • 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 

  • 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