Swimmer's Daily

  • Olympians Jimmy Feigen and Chloe Sutton talk about a myriad of topics as they interview each other on today’s episode of The Morning Swim Show!

  • A Philadelphia-area swimming pool that opened in the late 1950s for black members who were denied access to a nearby whites-only pool has filed for bankruptcy.

    Officials who put the Nile Swim Club of Yeadon into Chapter 11 protection on Wednesday didn’t explain the club’s survival plan in the seven-page bankruptcy petition.

    Officials launched a fundraising effort earlier this year, telling a local newspaper that the club needs to pay off about $134,000 in taxes and plans to start a competitive swim team and basketball league.

    The swim club, located in Yeadon, a suburb bordering Philadelphia, has a storied place in civil rights history. The facility opened in 1959 after two black families were not allowed into another “racially exclusive” club, according to the club’s website.

    “Club management stonewalled the applicants, indicated that their paper work had become lost and refused to admit them as guests or members of the facility,” the Nile Swim Club’s website said, adding that the effort to establish the Nile Swim Club got national media attention and support from singer Harry Belafonte and the Supremes.

    Read The Wall Street Journal

  • Club Borgosub Freediving freediving on a sunken ship

  • Her doctor’s words shook her like an earthquake: “If you don’t lose weight, you won’t get to your 60th birthday.”

    Vivian Stancil, a retired Long Beach schoolteacher, was 50. She stood 5 feet tall and weighed 319 pounds.

    “A bowling ball wouldn’t even describe what I was,” Stancil says. “I could barely walk. But I wanted to live, so I instantly knew what I had to do: change my diet and start exercising.”

    That would not be easy. Stancil’s social life revolved around going out to eat every day with her friends. As for exercise, Stancil hadn’t done it in 40 years — ever, really. She not only didn’t know how to swim but was so afraid of water that she couldn’t dunk her head in past her eyes.

    On top of that, she was legally blind.

    Read LA Times

  • A rich horde of fossils from the Sahara has revealed that the largest known predator to ever walk the earth was also a superb swimmer, overturning the common view that dinosaurs were terrestrial beasts.

    In a study published Thursday in the journal Science, an international research team described how it had uncovered the partial skeleton of a semiaquatic dinosaur, Spinosaurus, in Morocco. They estimate that the creature—not yet fully grown—measured 50 feet, at least nine feet longer than the largest documented Tyrannosaurus rex.

    “We’ve resurrected a giant from deep time…a lost world buried for more than 95 million years,” said Nizar Ibrahim, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago and lead author of the study. “It is arguably the most enigmatic dinosaur” yet described.

    The Wall Street Journal

  • First man home was Ger Wilkes, from Malahide and a member of North Dublin swimming club.

    “The hardest bit thinking people are coming up behind you, thinking, ‘Am I doing enough?’ I knew I was in the lead from about the Hal’penny Bridge. It was only a matter of hanging on then. O’Connell Bridge is liking going through a big dark tunnel, but it’s great. I put a lot of training in during the year, so I’m delighted, but shattered.”

    Rachel Lee, a member of Guinnness swimming club and a paramedic with Dublin Fire Brigade (DFB), was greeted by cheers from many of her colleagues on duty by the quayside, as she came in first in the women’s race.

    “I can’t believe it. I’m delighted,” she said. The hardest moment for her, she said, was “finding the finish point at the end”.

    See the Irish Times

    http://youtu.be/jlx3-SAWnv8

  • Sudbury’s Derald Balson competes in swimming at a national le​vel at the age of 86.

    That’s pretty impressive but consider also that he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis more than 40 years ago.

    Swimming using only his arms, he won two gold medals last month at the Canada 55 Plus Games in Strathcona County, Alberta.

    “A lady said to me once, you remind me of a seal,” Balson recalls.

    “And I said, ‘Gee, they’re not very nice looking things.’ And she said, ‘Yes, but did you ever see them swim?’ I said, ‘Yes, I have.’ She said, ‘You know how their tail fin goes just like that? That’s what your legs do.’”

    See CBC

  • Police are appealing for information about this man who was caught on camera rifling through a purse a Birmingham swimming baths.

    See ITV

  • Kyiv wants its combat dolphins back, but now they’re swimming for Russia.

    Read Foreign Policy via KiyvPost

    http://youtu.be/P0mJqjcfGwM