Swimmer's Daily

  • We (Brazil) were diving at Bat Islands, Costa Rica, when this peaceful manta came. Brian Thompson (Canada) gently cut the net fishing and now the manta can live with no pain.

    Courtesy of Oceano VideoSub on YouTube

  • Ocean advocate and endurance swimmer Lewis Pugh is undertaking the first long distance swim in all the 7 Seas (Mediterranean, Adriatic, Aegean, Black, Red and North Seas) to highlight the urgent need for more Marine Protected Areas (essentially national parks in the sea).

  • USA Swimming, in collaboration with the United States Olympic Committee, announced in April of 2013 that Omaha, Neb., has been selected as the host city for the 2016 U.S. Olympic Team Trials – Swimming.

  • LEN European Open Water Swimming Cup, Final – Castellabate (ITA)
    Italians sweep overall titles

    Italy’s Andrea Bianchi and Arianna Bridi won the respective overall titles in Castellabate in the two-day final of the LEN European Open Water Swimming Cup series.

    A tough challenge awaited those who went for the highest ranks in the general classifications: the Cup final was staged over two days with a normal 10km race on Saturday and a 5km time-trial on Sunday – the ranks in the final was based on the two results combined.

    Among the men the first day saw Hungary’s Mark Papp winning the 10km: though he fell behind during the first half but over the third and fourth lap he managed to overcome his 30m deficit. Papp held the 3rd place in the overall before the final just three points behind Andrea Bianchi – and on Saturday he gained 50sec on the Italian.

    However, Sunday was Bianchi’s day who managed to clock 1.11sec better time than Papp and that brought him the win in the final which offered double points (compared to the 5 legs held in the previous months). With that 40 points Bianchi secured his win in the overall classification while Papp came up to second (as he also was second in the final), passing the other Italian, Dario Verani.

    Since the women’s general classification was also quite close after five legs, it was clear that the winner of the final would clinch the overall title. Though Poland’s Natalie Charlos led by 3 points ahead of Italy’s Arianna Bridi before the final, Bridi managed to finish ahead of Charlos in both races. Bridi was much faster on both days, the gap between her and the Polish was more than 5 minutes. Bridi won the time-trial on Sunday, the 10km gold went to 2011 World champion Keri-Anne Payne: the British just wanted to compete in the Olympic distance and didn’t take part in the 5km on the next day.

    The first five placed swimmers in the general classifications – men and women – shared the pot of 21,000 Euro with the two overall winners receiving €3,500 apiece.

    Men’s 10km (Saturday)
    1. Mark Papp (HUN) 2:05:31.3
    2. Alberto Brumana (ITA) 2:05:34.7
    3. Andrea Bianchi (ITA) 2:06:21.7

    Men’s 5km (Sunday)
    1. Andrea Bianchi (ITA) 1:00:50.0
    2. Francesco Bianchi (ITA) 1:01:23.2
    3. Mathias Schweinzer (AUT) 1:01:25.8

    Men’s final (10km + 5km)
    1. Andrea Bianchi (ITA) 3:07:11.7 – 40 points
    2. Mark Papp (HUN) 3:07:32.3 – 34
    3. Alberto Brumana (ITA) 3:07:50.2 – 30

    Men’s general classification
    1. Andrea Bianchi (ITA) 80 – € 3500
    2. Mark Papp (HUN) 71 – € 3000
    3. Dario Verani (ITA) 63 – € 2000
    4. Matthias Schweinzer (AUT) 62 – € 1250
    5. Francesco Bianchi (ITA) 56 – € 750

    Women’s 10km
    1. Keri-Anne Payne (GBR) 2:14:33.5
    2. Arianna Bridi (ITA) 2:14:35.2
    3. Natalia Charlos (POL) 2:17:02.0

    Women’s 5km
    1. Arianna Bridi (ITA) 1:05:34.8
    2. Natalia Charlos (POL) 1:08:46.7
    3. Ludovica Galli (ITA) 1:09:09.7

    Women’s final (10km + 5km)
    1. Arianna Bridi (ITA) 3:20:10.0 – 40
    2. Natalia Charlos (POL) 3:25:48.7 – 34
    3. Giulia De Fusco (ITA) 3:28:51.9 – 30

    Women’s general classification
    1. Arianna Bridi (ITA) 91 – € 3500
    2. Natalia Charlos (POL) 88 – € 3000
    3. Nicole Cirillo (ITA) 70 – € 2000
    4. Giulia De Fusco (ITA) 69 – € 1250
    5. Johanna Gerstbauer (AUT) 35 – € 750

    Press release from LEN

    http://youtu.be/Z1LnnHKiACg

  • 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