Swimmer's Daily

  • London Olympic gold medallist Brittany Elmslie has withdrawn from the Australian swimming team for this year’s FINA World Championships in Russia after undergoing surgery to a remove a benign growth in her breast.

    Elmslie, who turns 21 on Friday, has pulled out of the team after the operation three weeks ago and the recovery causing her to miss vital training time in the past month.

    The Brisbane-based freestyler was selected to race the 4x100m and 4x200m freestyle relays in Kazan (August 2-9) but, after discussions with her coach Michael Bohl and Swimming Australia (SA), a relieved Elmslie believed it was in her and the team’s best interests to withdraw.

    Elmslie informed SA on Friday.

    “I’m disappointed not to be able to be in Kazan and be part of another successful Dolphins team but I know I am not ready to give my best for the team and that wouldn’t be fair on either myself or the team,” said Elmslie.

    “I haven’t been able to put in the training that’s required to compete at that level and, after a lot of thought, I have decided that I am best to work through my health issues here in Australia and begin my preparation for the Olympic trials (next April in Adelaide) now.

    “Swimming Australia and the people in my personal support group have been great in the last few weeks and I want to be able to repay their faith by being in the best shape possible in 2016.

    “I am meeting with national head coach Jacco Verhaeren and support staff this week to map out the next 12 months.”

    Read SBS

  • Do you think you know why your eyes turn red after a day of swimming? The answer is grosser than you think and might make you think twice about heading to the pool this summer.

    For their annual Healthy Swimming Program, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) teamed with Water Quality and the Health Council and the National Swimming Pool Foundation to educate Americans about the dangers of pools and how to stay healthy when swimming, according to Women’s Health.

    “We think that swimming is a really fantastic activity,” said Michael J. Beach, Ph.D., associate director of the CDC’s Healthy Water program. “We want to keep it that way.”

    One of the most shocking revelations the CDC shared was the truth behind what causes your eyes to become red and irritated after swimming in the pool. And it’s not the chlorine.

    “It’s quite the opposite,” said Beach. “Chlorine binds with all the things it’s trying to kill from your bodies, and it forms these chemical irritants. That’s what’s stinging your eyes. It’s the chlorine binding to the urine and the sweat.”

    Read ABC13

  • The Ukrainian swimmer Olga Beresnyeva has been stripped of a seventh-place finish at the London 2012 Olympics after failing a retrospective drugs test.

    The 29-year-old has had her 10km open water marathon event record expunged after an International Olympic Committee (IOC) investigation.

    The IOC conducted further analysis of samples collected at London 2012 earlier this year, finding Beresnyeva to have tested positive for banned substance recombinant erythropoietin (rEPO).

    “These additional analyses were performed with improved analytical methods in order to detect prohibited substances which could not be identified with the analyses performed at the time,” read an IOC statement.

    Read The Guardian

    Photo by spcbrass

  • The video of the incident has been viewed more than 10 million times on YouTube: police officers in McKinney, Texas, breaking up a pool party of mostly black teenagers, one officer pinning a black teenage girl in a bikini to the ground, and then pulling his gun on other teenagers.

    The incident quickly became part of the ongoing national conversation about police tactics, use of force and race. But it has also dredged up memories of the United States’ long, fraught history with race and swimming pools.

    Read here & now

  • See YouTube on Facebook

    The first ever European Games begin tomorrow in Azerbaijan. Watch them live on YouTube. https://goo.gl/DeX1yW #Baku2015

    Posted by YouTube on Thursday, June 11, 2015

  • The European Games kicks off in Baku, capital of Azerbaijan, on Friday. It’s the first Olympic-style sporting festival for the continent – but a hashtag first used by organisers and originally meant to celebrate the games has been turned on its head by human rights campaigners.

    #Baku2015 has been tweeted nearly 100,000 times in the last month. It was initially used back in 2012 after the European Olympic Committees launched the new tournament and named Baku as the first host city.

    But in recent days, amidst athlete interviews and pictures of Baku’s new stadium, a significant number of the most repeated messages are from activists and groups such as Human Rights Watch, PEN and Amnesty International. They’re using the tag to detail something very different: the arrests of journalists and the arbitrary detention of activists.

    Read BBC

    Photo by Kudosmedia

  • When adventurer Ben Hooper was five, he drowned in a Belgian swimming pool. This experience alone may excusably put off many from ever going near water again.

    But the father of one from Cheltenham is one of the few, rather than the many.

    The unassuming former police officer, 36, went to the entirely opposite end of the spectrum.

    Instead of shying away from water, he is going to attempt to swim 2,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean.

    Read Gloucestershire Echo

    https://youtu.be/1y50j5AwgD0

  • The sports minister Tracey Crouch has promised to deliver a new strategy for sport “as a matter of urgency” following a decline in participation.

    New figures published by Sport England have shown that the number of people playing sport has fallen, with swimming the most badly affected.

    Swimming is the country’s most popular sport with more than 2.5m people taking part weekly, but 144,200 fewer have taken to the pool in the last six months and 390,700 in the last year.

    Overall the statistics, which cover the period from October 2014 to March 2015, show that 15.5m people participated in some kind of sport once a week, every week – a figure 222,000 fewer than six months ago.

    Read The Guardian

    Photo by Katelyn Fay

  • In the Athletes Village in Baku athletes from Russia and Ukraine had a fight, reports our source in the Athletes Village of the European Games.

    According to the information, there was a verbal sparring between a group of Russian and Ukrainian athletes.

    Athletes could not hold back emotions and met in melee. Staff of the Olympic Village separated the fighters.

    Read Azeri Daily

    Photo by Kudosmedia