Swimmer's Daily

  • Mathew Stanley captured this GoPro footage of a baby seal climbing on his board and playing with him and a friend in the water.

    We caught up with Matt to get the low down on what happened:

    “Me and my friend Andrew Flounders were out enjoying some summer waves when this little guy came along and scared the hell out of Andy because we didn’t know what it was! It nudged his foot from underneath,” he explained.

    After an hour or so of playing around with the pup, the guys decided to head back to the shore, but the little guy hadn’t finished and tried to follow them up the beach. “When we got home Andy rang the local marine wildlife authority to make them aware of what occurred just in case the seal was unwell… He didn’t seem unwell when he was surfing in like a pro!”

  • Toronto Zoo’s polar bear cub explores the zoo’s Big Polar Bear Habitat for the first time and gets ready for his summer swim. Humphrey, born in November, seems a little shy about jumping in off the rocks, but he wades in and chomps on some rushing water like a pro.

    See USA Today

    See also Toronto Zoo on YouTube

  • High Performance Sport New Zealand, which allocates government funding for elite sport, will carry out a reviews of all the sports it funds that competed in Glasgow.

    Triathlon failed to win a medal in Glasgow and swimming relied on Lauren Boyle and para swimmer Sophie Pascoe to win medals.

    Both sports each received about $2 million in funding from the sports body this year.

    HPSNZ chief executive Alex Bauman, himself a former Olympic swimming champion for Canada, is disappointed at the lack of depth in swimming and triathlon.

    “While in swimming you know we have Lauren who performed well and obviously Sophie Pascoe, we would have liked to have seen a few more medals there, and triathlon I’m sure they would have been gutted with the performance even though Andrea came fourth, they were hoping to get two medals, so we’ll have to take a look at that for sure.”

    Read Radio New Zealand News

  • The most dominant distance swimmer of her generation serves meals to the homeless once a month.

    Maryland teenager Katie Ledecky also collects, assembles and repairs bicycles for developing countries instead of attending classes every other week during the school year.

    The Stanford-bound swim star volunteers with the Wounded Warrior Project at the Walter Reed Bethesda Naval Medical Center and is a member of Help2 0, a group that raises awareness and money to benefit the construction of water wells in developing countries.

    Ledecky and Cal sophomore Missy Franklin — the young faces of American swimming — are competing at the Phillips 66 U.S. championships Wednesday through Sunday in Irvine.

    Ledecky, 17, isn’t just another dedicated swimmer churning through chlorinated pools mornings and evenings. She describes herself as a devout Catholic who embraces the religion’s call to service.

    “My faith has always been important to me,” Ledecky said in a recent interview. “It defines who I am.”

    Most know her as an Olympic gold medalist, world-record holder and four-time world champion.

    Read San Jose Mercury News

  • Swimmers competing in the Dwight Crum Pier-to-Pier Swim had more than just other competitors to worry about.

  • REMUS SharkCam: The hunter and the hunted: In 2013, a team from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution took a specially equipped REMUS “SharkCam” underwater vehicle to Guadalupe Island in Mexico to film great white sharks in the wild. They captured more than they bargained for.

  • Sitting on the deck at his beloved Meadowbrook, Michael Phelps glances toward the pool where he was once afraid to put his face in the water.

    “This is me,” he said, a slight smile curling off his lips. “This is home.”

    This is where Phelps put in most of the work to become the most decorated athlete in Olympic history. This is where he’s looking to add to that legacy after an aborted retirement, his eyes firmly on the Rio Games two years away.

    And as the world’s greatest swimmer takes his comeback to it’s the biggest stop yet, this week’s U.S. national championships in Irvine, California, it’s important for him to remember where he came from.

    Why? Because for all the hoopla over LeBron James returning to Cleveland, there’s no bigger homebody than Phelps.

    Read Boston Herald

  • Five thousand. That’s the population of Coolangatta, Australia. Yet someway, somehow, this tiny town has produced more surfing world champions than anywhere else in the world.

    A lot of that has to do with the local wave. You may have heard of it – it’s called the Superbank. But in The Ripple Effect, we learn that the history of the Coolangatta Kids runs a whole lot deeper than the world’s most famous sandbar.

  • Following the remarkable introduction of High Diving in the FINA World Championships programme and crowning moment of the first-ever World champions in Barcelona (ESP) last year, Kazan (RUS) will host the inaugural edition of the FINA High Diving World Cup on August 8-10, 2014.

    Two events are on the programme: a men’s competition in three rounds (Aug 8 and 10) and a women’s competition in one round (Aug 9). Men will perform five dives from a 27m platform while women will take off from a 20m platform, exhibiting three dives.