Swimmer's Daily

  • Our John Chapman was given a backstage tour of the Olympic Swim Trials.

  • A bid to clear the Pacific of its plastic debris has moved a step closer with the launch of the biggest prototype clean-up boom yet by the Dutch environment minister at a port in The Hague.

    On Thursday the 100m-long barrier will be towed 20km out to sea for a year of sensor-monitored tests, before being scaled up for real-life trials off the Japanese coast at the end of next year.

    If all goes well, full-scale deployment of a 100km-long version will take place in the “great Pacific garbage patch” between California and Hawaii in 2020. […]

    The snake-like ocean barrier is made out of vulcanised rubber and works by harnessing sea currents to passively funnel trash in surface waters – often just millimetres in diameter – into a V-shaped cone.

    A cable sub-system will anchor the structure at depths of up to 4.5km – almost twice as far down as has even been done before – keeping it in place so it can trap the rubbish for periodic collection by boats.

    A fully scaled-up barrier would be the most ambitious ocean cleansing project yet, capturing around half of the plastic soup that circles the Pacific gyre within a decade. That at least is the plan.

    The largely crowd-funded project has caught the imagination of a new generation in the Netherlands. In no small part this is down to the unaffected charisma of its 21-year-old founder Boyan Slat, a student dropout turned environmental entrepreneur.

    Read The Guardian

    https://youtu.be/6IjaZ2g-21E

  • The 4,400-seat IU Natatorium in Indianapolis had sold out long before the meets in 1996 and 2000, and the potential of the event needed to be studied hard by Executive Director Chuck Wielgus and USA Swimming.

    “We kind of knew it was time,” said Mike Unger, the event director in 2000 and now USA Swimming assistant executive director. “Chuck always talks about standing on the 10-meter tower on the last night and looking down and seeing that we were kind of busting at the seams. And that’s sort of happened.”

    What was off there in the distance, had officials been able to see it then, was a future that will hit its highest note in 2016 as the U.S. Olympic Trials exceed 200,000 in total attendance for the first time, and with all 15 sessions sold out at the CenturyLink Center.

    Read Omaha.com

  • After finishing an uncharacteristic fourth in the opening round of the 2016 Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series in Texas two weeks earlier, defending champion Gary Hunt showed his rivals that he’s still the man to beat if they want to win this year’s title.

  • The Olympic trials for swimming start next week, but former University of Michigan standout Sean Ryan won’t be stressing about them — he already clinched his spot on Team USA.

    In fact, he will have been an Olympian for more than year before he actually competes in the Rio games. He qualified in July 2015 when he finished fourth in the open water 10K at the FINA World Championships.

    “A year is a really long time to go without having an intermediate goal along the way,” Ryan said.

    You would think an open water swimmer would train in a year-round warm weather climate, but Ryan couldn’t pull himself away from Michigan.

    “Because we have the best swimming training facilities and coaching staff, in my opinion, in the country,” he explained. “I don’t think there is anywhere else I would rather be.”

    Read WOOD TV

  • As the Syrian War intensified in 2014, Mardini and her sister left their home in Damascus, travelling to Beirut, Istanbul and finally Izmir in Turkey, where they embarked on their journey across the Mediterranean to the Greek island of Lesbos.

    During the sea crossing, the motor on their dinghy suddenly stopped. The tiny vessel meant only for six people was at risk of capsizing, with 20 desperate passengers huddled on board. Mardini, her sister and one other woman took to the water and pushed the boat until it reached the shore, saving the lives of everyone.

    “Only four out of 20 on the boat knew how to swim,” says Mardini, who represented Syria at the 2012 FINA World Swimming Championships. “It would have been shameful if the people on our boat had drowned. I wasn’t going to sit there.”

    Read Rio 2016

  • Former Stanford swimmer Brock Turner received a 6 month jail sentence for sexually assaulting a fellow female student because the judge deemed the trial itself as enough of a punishment, according to new reports.

    The presiding judge of Santa Clara County, Aaron Persky, concluded what many are calling a “slap on the wrist” as sufficient because media attention and legal proceedings were already stressful and disciplinary for Turner.

    The ex-Stanford swimmer blamed the university’s “party culture” and the pervasive temptations from booze that permeate social life on campus, according to a letter he sent to the judge prior to the sentencing

    Turner has not admitted that he sexually assaulted the woman, despite the guilty verdict. Both the victim and the prosecutor highlighted the feigned apology and what they consider a blatant lack of remorse during the trial.

    Persky said the 39 character references helped convince him that Turner deserved a shorter sentence. Persky cited one in particular — from friend Leslie Rasmussen — as one that stood out. “It sort of corroborates the evidence of his character up until the night of this incident, which has been positive,” the judge said.

    Read The Libertarian Republic

    https://youtu.be/0J-gLJjNuF8

  • In 2015, the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges put out a report calling exercise a “miracle cure.” This isn’t a conclusion based simply on some cohort or case-control studies. There are many, many randomized controlled trials. A huge meta-analysis examined the effect of exercise therapy on outcomes in people with chronic diseases.

    Let’s start with musculoskeletal diseases. Researchers found 32 trials looking specifically at the effect of exercise on pain and function of patients with osteoarthritis of the knee alone. That’s incredibly specific, and it’s impressive that so much research has focused on one topic.

    Exercise improved those outcomes. Ten more studies showed, over all, that exercise therapy increases aerobic capacity and muscle strength in patients with rheumatoid arthritis. Other studies proved its benefits in other musculoskeletal conditions, like ankylosing spondylitis, and even some types of back pain.

    For people (mostly middle-aged men) who had had a heart attack, exercise therapy reduced all causes of mortality by 27 percent and cardiac mortality by 31 percent. Fourteen additional controlled trials showed physiological benefits in those with heart failure. Exercise has also been shown to lower blood pressure in patients with hypertension, and improve cholesterol and triglyceride levels.

    People with diabetes who exercise have lower HbA1c values, which is the marker of blood sugar control, low enough to probably reduce the risk of complications from the disease. Twenty randomized controlled trials have showed that patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease can walk farther and function better if they exercise.

    Multiple studies have found that exercise improves physical function and health-related quality of life in people who have Parkinson’s disease. Six more studies showed that exercise improves muscle power and mobility-related activities in people with multiple sclerosis. It also appeared to improve those patients’ moods.

    The overall results of 23 randomized controlled trials showed that exercise most likely improves the symptoms of depression. Five others appear to show that it improves symptoms in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome. In trials, exercise even lessened fatigue in patients who were having therapy for cancer.

    What other intervention can claim results like these?

    Read The New York Times

     

  • Although Olympic champions can make great role models, sports officials can’t expect all athletes to be angels in their pursuit of results, according to Australian swimming great Ian Thorpe.

    The Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) has taken a hard line on team culture at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics, four years after their London Games delegation was embarrassed by a number of unsavoury incidents involving misbehaving athletes.

    Several athletes have been put on watch-list ahead of the Games, while the country’s top tennis player Nick Kyrgios withdrew himself from consideration after a row with the AOC over his behaviour in the public arena.

    Thorpe was a paragon of sportsmanship during a glittering swimming in which he won five Olympic golds and 11 world titles but said it was tough to expect all athletes to match sporting excellence with impeccable conduct.

    “I prefer them to be good leaders but it’s not a requirement,” Thorpe told Reuters in an interview. “We want them to be good role models, we want everyone to be perfect.

    “But what happens if the athlete isn’t perfect but they get the results? Which one’s more important? This is really difficult and it’s a difficult position for sports to be in.”

    Read Reuters