Swimmer's Daily

  • 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

  • Swimming inside an iceberg looks amazing because the ice looks like glass and that’s crazy, and because it kind of resembles an underwater version of Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. Or at least, like a crystal palace. National Geographic shows us how a free diver explores the ice cold waters below.

    See Sploid

    http://youtu.be/s5fysX2IQaA

  • In The Swimmer, John Cheever’s celebrated 1964 short story [pdf], Neddy Merrill decides to swim home via a dozen or so of his neighbours’ pools. Of course, to link this chain of water, he has to run across lawns, through woods and down busy roads.

    Inspired by Neddy’s watery journey, two south Londoners, Will Watt and Jonathan Cowie, came up with the idea of The Swimmer, a relaxed half-marathon that takes in a number of London’s finest parks and open-air pools. Starting in Hampstead in north London, the route heads down through the centre, crosses the Thames and ends up “back home” at Brockwell lido, near Brixton. It takes place on the second Saturday of each month (with a break for the summer) and over the past couple of years has quietly gained a reputation as one of the most interesting, esoteric, and certainly friendliest sporting events around.

    Read The Telegraph

  • Reigning world-champion breaststroker Christian Sprenger is determined to shake off a major shoulder injury in time for what will likely be his last Olympic Games.

    The 28-year-old fell apart at Glasgow’s Commonwealth Games, failing to make the 100m breaststroke final and swimming three seconds under his personal best.

    He blamed shoulder issues, which had started six weeks before the Games, but was unable to get the scans needed to diagnose the problem.

    The injury, which turned out to be tearing inside his shoulder tendon, ruled him out of the Pan Pacific championships a month after his disappointing Glasgow performance.

    After a shocker year, the two-time Olympic silver medallist says he’s facing four months out of the pool but is determined to beat the injury and finish his career on a high in Rio.

    “I’ve got unfinished business but I want to make sure I am 100 per cent before I commit back to any racing or training,” said Sprenger, who was to be inducted into the Sydney Olympic Park Aquatic Centre Path of Champions on Tuesday night.

    “(I’m) just making sure the time is right. I’ll give it a real solid effort to finish off my career.”

    Read The West Australian

  • Gavin Free captured footage of Dan Gruchy doing side flops and back flops into a swimming pool in the latest video by The Slow Mo Guys. The episode was filmed at 1,600 frames per second using a Phantom Flex camera.

    See Laughing Squid

  • You play as a luminous jellyfish at the bottom of an oceanic abyss. Your task is to weave through the narrow workings of the caverns to find light sources.

    You need this light in order to live a little longer, so it’s a constant race against time.

    Unfortunately for this fragile creature of the deep, the fading light isn’t the only threat to its ongoing existence.

    See Pocket Gamer