Australia’s Dawn Fraser recalls how she felt taking part in the Olympic games for the first time and describes how it felt winning gold at the Melbourne 1956 games. The four time Olympic gold medalist still considers 1956 as her most enjoyable Olympic games and explains the pride she felt swimming for her country at the Olympics for the first time.
Courtesy of Olympics on YouTube
Today in Bergen, Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg officially opened the impressive AdO arena svimming facility, named after Alexander Dale Oen.
Solberg mentioned Alex in her opening speech: ‘A person is missing here today. Norway’s undisputed top swimmer who passed away far too early, barely 27 years old. A great athlete, arguably one of the greatest.’
Images courtesy of Sander Englund Smørdal / simma.nu/no
Jacob’s Well, Wimberley, Texas, see for instance Wikipedia and visitwimberley.com
Australian marathon swimmer Chloe McCardel has successfully completed a world record 126km swim in the Bahamas.
McCardel’s support team says the 42 hour effort between two islands is the longest open-water solo, continuous marathon swim in history.
McCardel’s team say her effort surpasses a similar record set by Australian-British swimmer Penny Palfrey in 2011.
Read for instance The Sydney Morning Herald
http://youtu.be/NJAb7aC0OlE
http://youtu.be/nqiLY4tV6Xs
http://youtu.be/rg8Eycz9IiQ
With just over a month to go before the 12th FINA World Swimming Championships (25m), Qatar is already setting records as an unprecedented 1,300 swimmers have registered their interest in competing at Hamad Aquatic Centre.
Also, more than 500 team officials have registered to participate in the event.
As of yesterday, 174 countries will be represented at this year’s event, which will be held from December 3-7, 2014. Whilst athletes are still undergoing the formal approval process in order to confirm their place at swimming’s showpiece event, all signs point towards Qatar being set to attract more swimmers to a FINA World Swimming Championship (25m) than ever before. At the 11th FINA World Swimming Championships (25m) in Istanbul, 2012, 958 swimmers competed.
Read Gulf Times
Sport England’s Active People Survey shows that participation in football continues to decrease from 4.97% to 4.33% of the population and that 94% of participants are male. In fact, if walking is excluded, swimming is the national sport for participation, and 64% of participants are female. Running and cycling, in which the sexual division of play is also much more equal, are not far behind. This is important because the “booming national sport†narrative appears to legitimise spending more money on football than any other sport. This means Sport England funding per participant is £38 for football, but only £8 for swimming, £11 for athletics and £16 for cycling. In participation terms, football is neither the national sport nor booming. So, in what way does this constitute financial fair play?
Read The Guardian
Swimmers’ dream is to have an easy to use device to keep tracks of their performance, such as laps, time count, frequency monitoring etc.
With Xmetrics this dream comes to reality: fixed at your goggles, just on the back of your head, it provides a customizable real time audio feedback directly while swimming.
See Indiegogo
‘The Right’. The world’s most dangerous and unpredictable wave. Watch on as Monster Energy’s Ryan ‘Hippo’ Hipwood returns to conquer the wave that in 2012 nearly took his life.
Courtesy of Monster Energy on YouTube
The official Olympic film of the Atlanta 1996 Olympic Games in it’s entirety is now here on the official Olympic YouTube channel.
Swimming starts at 2:03:00
