Swimmer's Daily

  • China’s two-time Olympic gold medalist swimmer Ye Shiwen has a new title: College freshman.

    The 2012 London Games champion in the women’s 200- and 400-metre medleys registered this week at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University under a government program waiving the grueling entrance exam for outstanding athletes.

    The 18-year-old Ye told local media she plans to study law, but will have to balance classes with training for next month’s Asian Games at Incheon, South Korea.

    Read South China Morning Post

  • brianfitzpatrickA five-year-old boy who wrote an “amazing” fan letter to Scottish Commonwealth swimming champion Ross Murdoch has been traced.

    Brian Fitzpatrick’s note reached the swimmer despite being addressed simply to “Ross Murdoch, Commonwealth Champion, Balloch”.

    The 200m Breaststroke gold medal winner asked Twitter users to help him get back in touch with the youngster.

    Ross Murdoch now plans to meet Brian and show him where he trains.

    Read BBC

  • Our Lucky Puppies Delight in Swimming Pool Pawty

  • Italian explorer Alex Bellini has conceived an extraordinary plan to live alone on a drifting iceberg in northwest Greenland for up to a year, or until it melts away – whichever happens first. He aims to stay alive during this time in a tiny survival pod, and hopes his experience will encourage further discourse on climate change and the environment in general.

    Read Gizmag

  • At the FINA/Mastbank Swimming World Cup leg in Doha tonight, Hungary’s “Iron Lady” clipped the short course world record, clocking 4:20.83 in the 400 meters individual medley where her own world record from the Berlin leg of the 2013 World Cup series was 2:20.85. In the 100 meter IM later in the session, she was close to breaking the world record again, clocking 57.34 where her world record from this morning is 57.25. See the result list here

    Image courtesy of Doha Stadium Plus Qatar, CC BY 2.0

  • California Polytechnic State University student Christian Yellott recently captured some first-personGoPro footage of a fast jet ski trip through Mountain Sheep Canyon on Lake Powell in Arizona that bears more than a passing resemblance to a video game.

    Via Laughing Squid

  • Goliath grouper eating a black tip shark in one bite off the coast of Bonita Springs Florida. August 2014.

    Courtesy of Gimbb14 on YouTube

  • Duke Kahanamoku, who won a total of five swimming medals in Olympics from 1912 to 1924, probably did more than anyone else to bring the sport of surfing from his native Hawaiian islands to the United States mainland. Almost in reverse, he also played a substantial part in the Americanization of old Hawaii.

    Born in Honolulu in 1890, descended from patrician ancestors who counseled the Hawaiian monarchy, he grew up near Waikiki Beach as the son of a police captain. Duke was a child when Queen Liliuokalani was thrown under house arrest and Hawaii transformed, by aid of the United States Marines, into Uncle Sam’s territory.

    With no outward hint of resentment toward those who had seized and subjugated his country, Duke sought and won a place on the American swimming team at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, the only Hawaiian present. The Philadelphia Inquirer sportswriter Edgar Forrest Wolfe (who used the pen name Jim Nasium) pronounced Kahanamoku in 1913 “a human fish” and “the greatest swimmer the world of sport has ever seen.”

    Read The New York Times

  • In 2012, Michael Phelps saw the writing on London’s Aquatic Centre scoreboard. In the third of four preliminary heats of the Olympic 400-meter individual medley, the Japanese teenager Kosuke Hagino clocked at 4 minutes 10.01 seconds.

    Phelps, the world-record holder in the event since 2002, remembered cringing, because he was in the final heat and Hagino’s time was faster than he had expected to have to push himself.

    In the Olympic final, Hagino pushed Phelps off the medals podium and toward retirement when he edged him for the bronze. A year later, Hagino competed in six individual events and one relay at the world championships in Barcelona, Spain, and collected two seconds, three fifths and a seventh.

    Read The New York Times