Swimmer's Daily

  • Ever wonder what it would be like to compete against 18-time gold medalist Michael Phelps?

    An American Fork man knows exactly what it feels like and now he’s hoping to be on the same Olympic team.

    McKay King, 24, is hoping to make the U.S. Olympic swim team and head to Rio de Janeiro this summer to compete in the 100-meter butterly and the 50-meter freestyle.

    “I’m training to make it to the Olympic trials,” King said. And he’s less than a second away form making the times in both events.

    So he has been training five to six hours a day.

    “To be at this point and to be able to be so close and have a shot is really amazing opportunity,” said King.

    See KUTV

  • Landlocked Luxembourg has among the cleanest swimming spots in Europe, an EU-wide water quality auditi has found.

    Luxembourg topped the ranking in the report released on Wednesday, recording “good” or “excellent” water quality in all 11 of its outdoor wild swimming holes.

    The tests concerned bathing water at the Remerschen swimming lake in south-east Luxembourg, and at 10 sites located around the Lake in the mid-north of Luxembourg.

    Other countries achieving excellent in at least 90 percent of swimming sites included Cyprus, Malta, Greece, Croatia, Italy, Germany and Austria.

    The European Environment Agency (EEA) said that water quality at 96.1 percent of the 21,000 bathing spots covered by its 2015 bathing water survey was at acceptable levels, which was a rise of 0.9 percentage points from the previous year.

    Across all of the sites monitored in the EU, Switzerland and Albania, more than 84 percent of the sites surveyed were rated excellent.

    “Several large tourist areas and cities like Blackpool, Copenhagen and Munich are… starting to benefit from investments in improved sewage systems, which are leading to cleaner bathing sites at harbour areas, urban river locations and nearby beaches,” the agency said.

    Read Luxemburger Wort

    Photo by keivi

  • Blind Cap, is the first swimming cap provided with a vibration system and Bluetooth technology that, synchronized to Samsung Gear S2 or Android, removes the touch signal used so far to alert blind swimmer at the exact moment of the turn.

    Blind cap is more than just a cap, it’s a project in which Samsung wants to bring technology to elite athletes, allowing them to go a step further by improving the conditions of the sport in which they dedicate their lives to.

    “A winning lap in the world of paralympic swimming”

  • United We Will Swim… Again tells the incredible story of a community’s fight to save their swimming pool. It’s one of Glasgow’s famous political stories and is brought to life in this inspiring documentary, with original footage from the protest and interviews with the key activists involved. The film aims to inspire and motivate community engagement and action in the hope that ordinary people will assert their power and challenge short sighted local government decisions.

  • How to determine if your water is safe

  • A stroke left David with little use of his arm and leg. Thanks to his aquatic therapy classes at Sharp Grossmont Hospital, David grows stronger each day and closer to his goal of getting back on skiis.

  • Unlike most people, the children of a Thailand tribe see with total clarity beneath the waves – how do they do it, and might their talent be learned?

    “When the tide came in, these kids started swimming. But not like I had seen before. They were more underwater than above water, they had their eyes wide open – they were like little dolphins.”

    Deep in the island archipelagos on the Andaman Sea, and along the west coast of Thailand live small tribes called the Moken people, also known as sea-nomads. Their children spend much of their day in the sea, diving for food. They are uniquely adapted to this job – because they can see underwater. And it turns out that with a little practice, their unique vision might be accessible to any young person.

    In 1999, Anna Gislen at the University of Lund, in Sweden was investigating different aspects of vision, when a colleague suggested that she might be interested in studying the unique characteristics of the Moken tribe. “I’d been sitting in a dark lab for three months, so I thought, ‘yeah, why not go to Asia instead’,” says Gislen.

    Read BBC

  • The former head coach of SA swimming‚ Dirk Lange‚ is threatening to sue over accusations that he is helping swimmers from China to dope ahead of the 2016 Rio Games.

    The Sunday Telegraph in Britain reported that some of the China’s top swimmers‚ including two who have previously tested positive for drugs‚ have moved their pre-Olympic camp to a “discreet location” in Turkey.

    The report said they were training in a programme run by “controversial German swim coach Dirk Lange”.

    It quoted another swim coach‚ Bill Sweetenham‚ questioning if China had chosen the venue to evade drug tests.

    In a statement posted on the Dirk Lange Personal Training GmbH page on Facebook on Wednesday‚ Lange hit out at the UK accusations.

    Read Times Live