Swimmer's Daily

  • Watch our waterside video interview with Team Speedo USA swim star and Olympic gold medallist, Jessica Hardy. We chat Disney movies, sport and people watching with the 11-time world record holder.

    https://youtu.be/o2dcraRN-1g

  • Gregorio Paltrinieri won’t be surprised again by Sun Yang.

    The Italian swimmer recovered from his initial shock over his Chinese rival’s last-minute no-show to win the longest race in the pool at this year’s World Championships.

    For next year’s Rio de Janeiro Olympics, Paltrinieri is already considering the possibility that Sun won’t enter the 1500m freestyle at all.

    “It would be great if for once I could really race him stroke for stroke. I’m not afraid of a showdown with him. In fact I would relish that,” Paltrinieri said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

    “But I’ve also got to realize that he might not enter,” Paltrinieri added. “I’ve got to keep the option open in my mind that if he doesn’t race I’m going to be the favorite in an Olympic final and all eyes are going to be on me just like everyone was watching Sun Yang before.”

    At the World Championships in Kazan, Russia, in August, Sun created chaos in the ready room when he failed to show up for the final of an event that he had dominated for five years.

    Sun attributed the no-show to a heart problem but he also got into an altercation with a Brazilian swimmer in the warmup pool on the day of the final.

    There were already questions over Sun’s form since he served a three-month doping suspension last year for a banned stimulant. And he didn’t dominate as usual in the 800 free, coming from behind over the last two laps to narrowly edge Paltrinieri for gold.

    Three months later, Paltrinieri suspects Sun was afraid of losing.

    “It could have been that he was ill. I’m not doubting that. But he was definitely tense and nervous. I had finished this close to him in the 800,” Paltrinieri said, holding his hands less than a meter (yard) apart. “And in the 1500 heats I had beat him by a lot. So I think he just wasn’t so sure anymore that he could win the 1500. And that must have been a factor.”

    Since neither Sun nor the Chinese team told organizers that he wasn’t racing, his lane remained empty for the final and reserve Pal Joensen of the Faeroe Islands was denied a chance to compete.

    “I still don’t understand what happened and I don’t think we ever will,” said Stefano Morini, Paltrinieri’s coach. “The Chinese are a fairly enigmatic people and they don’t really express themselves too much. And that can be a good thing. We Italians talk too much.”

    Read NBC Sports

  • Tim Layden is a Senior Writer for Sports Illustrated who primarily covers the NFL and the Olympics.

    Tim joined Ken and Steve to talk about Michael Phelps and his struggles with alcoholism.

    Listen to CBS Baltimore

  • The state of Wisconsin produces plenty of great high school athletes that go on to college and compete in their respective sport, but very few of them get offered an athletic scholarship to one of the best schools in the country.

    A senior from Cedarburg High School is making that dream come true and breaking records along the way.

    “I think it’s a comforting feel. I think you can escape everything once you hit the water,” Katie Drabot said.

    See WISN

  • Katinka Hosszu (HUN) and Cameron van der Burgh (RSA) are the winners of the 2015 edition of FINA/airweave Swimming World Cup after the conclusion of the eighth leg of the competition, organised in Dubai (UAE) on November 6-7. At the end of the series, the Magyar star collected 669 points, while the South African star led the overall ranking with 369 points. This is the fourth consecutive win for Hosszu, the best of the World Cup since 2012, while Van der Burgh had already won in 2008 and 2009. For their victories, they will receive the top prize money of US$ 100,000 each.

  • He’s a 10-time swimming world champion and currently holds two world records – meet Grant Hackett, Aussie swimmer and Team Speedo athlete. In this waterside video interview, we give Grant a grilling about cartoons, surfing and his guilty pleasure.

  • Swimming has a global doping crisis on the same scale as athletics, leading coaches have warned.

    ‘People saying this is not just Russia and not just athletics are 100 per cent correct,’ John Leonard, executive director of the World Swimming Coaches Association, told Sportsmail.

    The association are concerned about possible corruption in swimming’s international governing body and have repeatedly raised their concerns with the World Anti-Doping Agency.

    There are fears that the ‘state-sponsored’ doping in Russian athletics revealed this week may be echoed in swimming.

    Russia currently has 27 swimmers serving doping bans and earlier this year came within one anti-doping violation of being temporarily suspended from competition.

    There is evidence of young teenagers taking performance-enhancing drugs — with 14-year-old backstroke swimmer Daria Ustinova testing positive in 2012.

    Leonard added: ‘I am absolutely sure that the Russian swimmers were involved in this system as well as the track-and-field athletes. Russia are always great at the junior level and not as good at the senior level and nobody so far has offered an explanation as to why.

    ‘It’s obviously criminal because 14 year olds are not giving themselves drugs so someone is criminally affecting the health of children, as they did in the old East German days. Russia has been a greenhouse for this for many decades now.’

    Leonard is concerned the sport’s governing body, FINA, carry out drug testing, saying: ‘You cannot have the organisations that are charged with promoting the sport also being the people who decide who gets tested and what they get tested for — which is just as important. That’s the fox watching the hen house and it’s completely unrealistic to have a clean sport when that’s the case.

    ‘We want to know who decides which swimmer gets tested for what banned substances. The fear is that is being done by professionals in the FINA office to cover for star swimmers.’

    Read MailOnline

     

  • Gwangju’s ability to host the 2019 FINA World Aquatics Championships is looking shaky after the central government said it will not cover any costs.

    The Gwangju Metropolitan Government is in a real fix since the budget for the competition has jumped from the original estimate of 114.9 billion won ($99.6 million) to 185 billion won.

    The Ministry of Strategy and Finance is steadfast that it will not allocate any part of the budget to support the aquatic games.

    It has blamed forged documents used to win the competition to host the championship in 2013.

    In July 2013, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism accused Gwangju’s city government of forging documents that pledged financial support from the central government to the city for the games.

    The Culture Ministry alleged that Gwangju Mayor Kang Un-tae and other city officials had been involved in forging the signatures of former Prime Minister Kim Hwang-sik and former Culture Minister Choi Gwang-sik to win the competition to host the World Aquatics Championships in 2019.

    The revelation came only hours before FINA announced that Gwangju’s bid had won.

    The Gwangju city government maintained that the forged signatures were the result of a staff member’s mistake and that it had replaced the forged letter with a proper one in June.

    The central government vowed not to offer any financial assistance for the games.

    Two Gwangju city officials, including Kim Yoon-seok, director of the bidding committee, were indicted with detention by the Gwangju District Prosecutors’ Office that September. But prosecutors did not charge Mayor Kang because of a lack of evidence that he had ordered the forgeries.

    Read Korea Joongang Daily

  • FINA expresses its deep concern after the publication of WADA’s Independent Commission report and its impact in worldwide sport in general.

    As a pillar of the Olympic movement, FINA, as world governing body for Aquatics, undertakes a strong and robust policy in order to optimise the efficacy of our anti-doping strategies; to preserve the validity and integrity of FINA competitions; and to protect the clean athletes in the five continents.

    Concerning Russia, the nation that is mentioned in this report, it has organised, for the first time, from July 24-August 9, the 2015 edition of the FINA World Championships. During this event, 645 samples were collected for analysis by the FINA Doping Control Review Board, led by Prof. Andrew Pipe, as part of the in-competition testing programme. These comprised 457 urine and 188 blood tests. There were a further 418 blood screenings as part of the Athlete Biological Passport programme. These tests were analysed in the WADA-accredited laboratory in Moscow, under the supervision of independent observers from the WADA-accredited laboratories in Barcelona (ESP) and London (GBR). Every single sample collected during the Kazan 2015 FINA World Championships will be transferred and stored in the WADA-accredited laboratory in Barcelona (ESP).

    Moreover, all of FINA’s unannounced out-of-competition doping control programme in Russia is conducted by IDTM, an independent Swedish company. In the 2014 season the majority of out-of-competition doping control tests had been analysed by the WADA-accredited laboratory in Moscow, which had been judged fully compliant with the WADA code at the time. However, following the announcement of the official investigation, FINA made the decision to move the overwhelming majority of the analysis of Russian athletes’ samples out of Russia. In 2015, over 80% of the samples collected in Russia were analysed in the WADA-accredited laboratories in Barcelona (ESP) and Köln (GER). The samples of Russian athletes living or training outside Europe were analysed in the WADA-accredited laboratories in Montreal (CAN) and Salt Lake City (USA).

    FINA President Dr. Julio C. Maglione said: “Of course this is a difficult time for sport, and as sports people we at FINA are shocked and saddened by WADA’s Independent Commission report. FINA upholds a strong and unequivocal stance on the practice of doping as we aim to eradicate doping from Aquatics. FINA is committed to do everything necessary to become the world’s cleanest sport.”

    Read FINA

    Photo by Richard Masoner / Cyclelicious