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
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
