Swimmer's Daily

  • Olympic Gold Medalist Michael Phelps met Friday with the Boys and Girls Club of Metropolitan Baltimore at the Meadowbrook Aquatic and Fitness Center to promote water safety.

  • Olympic breaststroke gold medallist Cameron van der Burgh says he needs to remain among the top swimmers in his specialist event this year if he is to successfully defend his title at the 2016 Rio Olympic Games.

    Van der Burgh made a good start to the season with the fourth fastest time in the world this year of 59,78 seconds at the South African National Aquatic Championships in Durban in April.

    “The main goal in the year before the Olympic Games is to try and be in contention for the gold next year,” Van der Burgh said at the side of the pool at his base at the University of Pretoria on Wednesday. “If you are not in the medals this year, you are sort of falling behind and in 2011 the main goal for me was to work my way up to the 100m breaststroke and get up there.”

    Read Sport24

    Photo by Jennifer Su

  • If you are a beginner when it comes to swimming in open water, we give some valuable tips if for a safe session.

  • Big wave surfing ain’t for the faint of heart, or breath for that matter. Mark Mathews shows us how the most elite big wave riders train themselves to bare with multi-wave hold downs, and the gnarly conditions that come with taking on giant waves that the surfers may face at Red Bull Cape Fear 2015: A head-to-head surf contest where the world’s best will battle it out on one of the gnarliest waves in Australia.

  • The Norwegian public broadcasting company NRK has the video, that was shown during the unveiling of a statue of Alexander Dale Oen in Øygarden where Alex hailed from. The song is performed by 18-year-old Isabel Park from Øygarden, who made the song together with her mom.

  • How far would you go for the perfect wildlife photo? Would you sit on a rotting whale carcass in the midst of great white shark feeding frenzy? Well, that’s exactly what one scientist photographer does in the clip above, which aired back in 2008 on the Discovery Channel.

    See PetaPixel

    Personally, I am not sure it was so smart to sit on the whale’s guts, in case they blew

  • A South Korean court has found Japanese swimmer Naoya Tomita guilty of stealing a camera at the Incheon Asian Games in September last year.

    The district court in Incheon fined Tomita 1 million won (about $890), as called for by prosecutors.

    Tomita had initially admitted to the charge of stealing the camera, which belonged to a South Korean news agency and was left next to a pool on Sept. 25. But he later claimed he was falsely accused.

    Tomita, who won the men’s 200-meter breaststroke at the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games, denied the accusation at a press conference in Japan last November and claimed that someone unbeknownst to him had stolen his bag before placing the camera in question inside.

    He again denied committing the crime when the trial opened in the South Korean port city in January, saying: “There is no truth that I stole a camera.”

    He argued that he had no interest or knowledge of cameras in the first place, adding that it would be impossible for him to even know how to remove the professional telescopic lens before stealing the camera, as claimed by the prosecution.

    Police who investigated the incident maintained that video footage from the surveillance camera clearly shows Tomita committing the crime.

    The presiding judge said in the ruling that Tomita’s claim was “difficult to believe.”

    Tomita told reporters after the ruling that he would decide whether or not to lodge an appeal within the next seven days.

    “The surveillance camera footage is unclear and I can’t accept this ruling,” he said.

    Read The Japan Times

    https://youtu.be/_AUdi6cDR94

  • An Italian boy who fell into a canal in Milan has survived despite being held underwater for as long as 42 minutes.

    The 14-year-old, who is said to have jumped off a bridge in Cuggiono with five friends into water which was just 6.5-feet deep, was in hospital for a month, Time reported.

    His heart stopped beating while he was in the water and he was assumed dead, until it was restarted with a defibrillator.

    Even his rescue was an incredible feat – taking a team of people and fire service divers 42 minutes to form a human chain and drag him from the murky canal bed.

    The teenager, who is half-German but has only been identified as ‘Michael’ by The Milan Chronicle, was attached to life support to enable his lungs and heart to recover and to keep his body oxygenated.

    But after four weeks in hospital in San Raffaele, he is said to have woken, spoken to his parents and asked whether his favourite football team, Juventus, was still in the Champions League.

    His doctor, Alberto Zangrillo – personal physician to the Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi – told Italian media that the boy’s resuscitation was “the greatest satisfaction of my entire professional career” and said that the cold water had helped save his life because it caused a slow down of his vital functions.

    The team also used a technique called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) to extract oxygen-deprived blood, warm it up and add oxygen, before pumping it back into the body, The Times reported.

    After 10 days of using the technique, which mimics the function of the heart, while Michael was in an induced coma, he survived.

    “After 15 days we performed an MRI scan and his brain appeared OK,” said Dr Zangrillo.

    His right leg had to be amputated below the knee due to circulation problems, but he is now said to be “alert”, without brain damage, and remembers what happened before the accident.

    Read The Independent

    Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

  • A conversation with Steven LaBue, Red Bull Professional Cliff Diver, filmed at the International Swimming Hall of Fame, on May 26th, 2015. In the conversation, Steven talks about Cliff Diving and the time he hit his head on the Platform 92 feet above the water in La Rochelle, France.