• Payton College Prep student Claire Luning said she was halfway through swimming the 50-yard butterfly during a practice two weeks ago at Jones College Prep when something felt off.

    “I remember breathing really hard,” said Luning, 16, a junior and member of the Jones-Payton swim team. “I mean, I was racing, but it didn’t feel normal. I couldn’t breathe. I wasn’t taking in enough oxygen, and I kind of started to panic, but I kept going for some reason. It kind of went fuzzy then … I remember grabbing onto the lane line and people calling my name but I didn’t have the energy to answer them and tell them I was OK.”

    Luning was going into cardiac arrest. Her teammate hoisted her up near the gutter and called out to swim coach Mac Varilla, who learned CPR about 10 years ago as a lifeguard with the Chicago Park District but never had to use it before.

    Read Chicago Tribune, Inquistr and see KWQC

  • Thursday afternoon in Helsingborg, Sweden, a man suddenly fell through one of the roof windows of the public swimming pool Simhallsbadet, and 14 meters down into the children’s pool.

    – “He landed on his side and stomach and that was lucky. The pool is only 70 centimeters deep. He definitely had a guardian angel watching over him, ” says Stefanos Manoloudis, swimming pool manager.

    – “In the little pool where he landed, there fortunately was only a father with his little son, and they were some distance away,” says Manoloudis.

    In the stands there were children with their parents attending a swim school lesson, who became witnesses to the man’s lengthy fall.

    – “They saw it all and some were of course shocked,” says Manouloudis.

    The man was brought to the hospital in Helsingborg, but had sustained only minor injures and could later the same evening leave it on his own accord.

    The police is investigating the incident. The swimming pool staff have been busy cleaning the pools for glass splinters, and need to empty the kiddy pool, but hoped to be able to open the main pool already today.

    Read Helsingborg Dagblad (in Swedish)

     

  • Courtesy of Gistrup Film on YouTube

  • Organizers and judges at the 2015 AIDA Individual Depth Championships (#aidaworldchampionship) Pre-Competition in Cyprus are looking into how a line was set to the wrong depth and causing the diver – French Freediving hero Guillaume Nery – to dive to -139m/456ft instead of -129m/-423ft that he had announced the night before.

    10m/33ft doesn’t sound like much but when diving as deep as a skyscraper into the depths this sort of mistake can be fatal.

    Guillaume Nery suffered a Black Out at 15m/49ft as he came to surface from his Constant Weight (CWT) dive – one that would have seen him set a new World Record should he have succeeded.

    Nery had this to say to DeeperBlue.com after the dive

    “I announced 129m and I got to the bottom of the rope at 139m. I have had a bad squeeze but luckily I made it back. I did black out at around 15m. I remember grabbing the tag, thinking, ‘good, it should be OK’ and then nothing. It was long before I came back around. It was a close call…”

    Read Deeper Blue

    https://vimeo.com/112491662

  • 2016 U.S. Olympic Team Men’s Head Coach Bob Bowman of Arizona State University chats with three-time Olympic gold medalist Rowdy Gaines.

  • 2016 U.S. Olympic Team Women’s Head Coach David Marsh of SwimMAC Carolina chats with three-time Olympic gold medalist Rowdy Gaines.

  • The Tarzan Boat is a boat with a bunch of jumping platforms and trampolines and rope swings and a slide attached. Sadly, there is no circus cannon. It still looks like a great time though.

    See Geekologie

  • During the College Football Playoff, Olympic swimmer Missy Franklin made no secret about her crush on then Oregon Ducks quarterback Marcus Mariota. Now that he is in the NFL has Missy changed her thoughts on the Tennessee Titans QB?

  • It was dogs day Monday in Calgary outdoor pools. Dogs were invited to take a plunge after the pools closed for the season to raise money for charity. To see more: http://www.cbc.ca/1.3218745