Swimmer's Daily

  • The dual Olympic 1500m champion may be on the comeback trail, but he reserves the right to step off at any time if he doesn’t want to continue.

    Having watched the hype that surrounded his great friend and rival Ian Thorpe’s failed comeback for the 2012 Olympics, Hackett is cautious about his own prospects and does not want them overblown.

    He is 34 and has been out of the pool for six years. His last race was the 1500m final at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. He knows he’s not the swimmer he was. But the competitor’s heart still beats within.

    “This is the last time that my body will be young enough to do this,” he said between training sessions at the Gold Coast yesterday.

    However, he will not commit to a full campaign to qualify for a fourth Games in Rio next year until he is certain he still has the speed and stamina to match the younger generation.

    “I am not getting ahead of myself in any way. If I can’t get to a level that I find satisfactory I will shut up shop.”

    And those hoping to see him back swimming the 1500m are destined for disappointment.

    “I have no desire to swim the 1500m again.” […]

    Hackett revealed that it was a conversation with the American super­star Michael Phelps (who came back last year) at the Pan ­Pacific championships on the Gold Coast last August that made him reconsider. “Michael said ‘You should swim again’ and it was the first time that I felt like I wanted to get back in the water,” Hackett said.

    Read The Australian

    http://youtu.be/Ohfi79LD_WE

  • One reason for my love of underwater swimming was my failure on the surface. My college roommate, Cromwell Anderson, was captain of the swim team, but I was simply a flop at the crawl or backstroke. I could, however, swim farther underwater than he could. I was able to make it twice the length of our Olympic pool, 100 meters in all, before surfacing. I thought this was great until another friend did three laps.

    It turns out, I now learn, that we were doing something very foolish. And I exacerbated that foolhardiness by often swimming those laps alone in the pool. There is an effect associated with this kind of underwater swimming so important that it has been assigned a name, shallow water blackout. People die from it. Last summer, Annapolis Midshipman Kyle Hurdle passed out while doing so and lifeguards were unable to revive him.

    Read The Buffalo News

    Photo by ctsnow

  • Yesterday at the CRASH-B Sprint World Indoor Rowing Championships in Boston, USA, Faroe Island’s Dánjal Martin Hofgaard won the men’s open lightweight discipline.

    Get this, Dánjal Martin born 1989 is a childhood friend of Pál Joensen born 1990, from the same tiny street of Skálabeiti in Vágur (population 1361) in Faroe Islands (population 49,709). They grew up training under first coach Johan Martin Thorsteinsson in the local swim club Vágs Svimjifelag (VS), and then under coach Jón Bjarnason in the merged swim club Suðuroyar Svimjifelag (SuSvim).

    One is currently the European vice-champion in the 800 and 1500 meter freestyle. The other is the World Champion in indoor rowing.

    We don’t care about odds. Framá Føroyar !

  • Every elite athlete is looking for an edge, and Emily Seebohm has found hers while hanging upside down from a pole.

    After beginning her year with unprecedented speed, the world’s No 1-ranked 100m backstroker has revealed that twice-weekly pole dancing classes have contributed to her outstanding form.

    “I’ve done that for about a year now and I find that it gives me something outside of the normal gym that really works my core muscles and my strength, which is exactly what I need,” Seebohm explained. “Leading into the Olympics, you need to find those little bits that aren’t fine-tuned, and for me, this is one of the few things that I can work on other than my swimming skills, so it’s been really good.”

    “It’s fun and it’s easy to do when you’re strong. The first couple of sessions I was so unco-ordinated because I was used to doing other things but I’ve nailed some of the tricks now.”

    Read The Australian

  • Generic, non-Olympic advertising by athletes during the Olympics will be allowed if an International Olympic Committee executive board proposal is approved in July.

    The board proposed changes to Rule 40 and Rule 50 of the Olympic Charter, the IOC said Thursday.

    “It has to do with advertising around the games, on a social media site, or newspaper, or whatever,” IOC spokesman Mark Adams said, according to The Associated Press. “So if someone has a contract with a watch manufacturer, that may continue as long as the advert doesn’t relate to the games.

    “Athletes have wanted this changed for a very long time. It’s been a very long discussion.”

    The Olympic Charter currently restricts that for about a month period around the Games.

    Read NBC OlympicTalk

  • Lewis Pugh, who is the United Nation’s Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Patron of the Oceans, is undertaking a series of swims in the Antarctic Ocean to influence world leaders to make the Ross Sea – which is under serious threat from commercial fishing and global warming – a Marine Protected Area.

    And Pugh has spoken of the intense pain he suffered swimming in -1.7C waters, with a 50-minute hot shower required afterwards to get his core body temperature back to a healthy level.

    ‘It was an exceptionally tough swim, especially as I had to navigate around sharp ice and couldn’t just keep my head down and swim,’ he said.

    ‘My fingers were in absolute agony from around the 300m mark, I’ve never felt pain like it before.

    Read Metro

  • World Cup winner and former World Player of the Year Fabio Cannavaro has been given a 10-month custodial sentence for breaking into his own home.

    The retired footballer, who captained Italy to World Cup glory in 2006, had been ordered to stay out of his Naples address after prosecutors claimed that elements of the property breached planning regulations.

    They said that Cannavaro hadn’t properly applied for planning permission for development of the house and surrounding grounds, which was seized by authorities.

    Prosecutor Luigi Cannavale said that Cannavaro, along with his wife, Daniela Arenoso and brother Paolo, who is a professional footballer in Italy’s top division, broke a seal restricting entry to the property and went swimming in the pool.

    Read CNN

    Photo by HotGossipItalia

  • A 17-year-old boy who had been swimming in an apartment complex’s Olympic-size indoor pool while wearing sweatpants drowned on Wednesday, prosecutors said.

    Ibrahim Iqbal, of New York City, had been swimming for some time in the pool at the Crystal Village Apartments in Attleboro, where he had been staying with relatives, and his cousin was nearby, Bristol County district attorney’s office spokesman Gregg Miliote said.

    Iqbal initially had been doing laps in the pool but then started swimming to the bottom of the 9-foot deep end, touching the bottom and coming back up for air, Miliote said. His cousin, who was with him at the pool but wasn’t swimming, said he did this several times before failing to come back up for air.

    Read ABC, NY Daily News, 7News

    7News Boston WHDH-TV

  • Diana Nyad, who made history as the first person to swim across the Florida Straits without a shark cage, isn’t scared of wading into another challenge — theater.

    The 65-year-old endurance swimmer is performing “Onward! The Diana Nyad Story,” a one-woman show in Key West, Florida, near the spot where in 2013 she achieved her dream of 35 years.

    “I think the show has a little bit of a lightening-in-a-bottle to it. I think big and I’d love to make it to Broadway,” she said by phone Friday. “But, as I’ve learned with anything, the only way to get there is to work quietly and slowly, step by step by step.”

    Read StarTribune