Read Focus Taiwan
Tens of thousands of people joined an annual mass swimming event on Sunday across Sun Moon Lake, Taiwan’s largest fresh water lake.
Over 25,000 swimmers attempted the 3,000-meter swim across the lake in the central county of Nantou, including 237 disabled people and 1,088 foreign swimmers from 30 countries, organizers said.
Read Deadline
Southland‘s Ben McKenzie is set to star in The Swimmer, about an American extreme swimmer who sets out to conquer one of Norway’s wildest rivers and in doing so must confront his inner demons. The Swimmer is backed by the U.S.-Norway Film Development Project as well as the regional film funds of Norway and will also star Norwegian thesps Agnes Kittelsen and Kristoffer Joner.  Filming is set to begin in Norway in June 2014.
Read Eyewitness News
Swimmer Gerhard Zandberg on Monday told Eyewitness News Sport that he is hoping his Swimming South Africa appeal hearing will be a catalyst for change in swimming.
Zandberg was served with a R5,000 fine and ordered to do community service after switching rooms at the recent World Championships without consent.
He lodged an appeal against the sanction on his return to South Africa.
Zandberg says his roommate Cameron van der Burgh was sick and that his plea to move went unanswered.
The swimmer eventually changed rooms, at his own expense, before being disciplined in Barcelona just hours before his semi-final race in the 50 metres backstroke.
Image courtesy of Marceldaponte, CC BY-SA 3.0
The media world is exploding in news about how a community of marathon swimmers is now questioning whether Diana Nyad actually accomplished the feat to swim the 110 miles from Cuba to Florida. See for instance philly.com, 10News, Ocala.com, ABC Action News, pnj.com, Las Vegas Guardian Express, The Vancouver Sun, ESPN, cbs12.com, …
On social media and the online Marathon Swimmers Forum, long-distance swimmers have been debating whether Nyad got a boost from the boat that was accompanying her – either by getting in it or holding onto it – during a particularly speedy stretch of her swim. They also question whether she violated the traditions of her sport – many follow strict guidelines known as the English Channel rules – by using a specialized mask and body suit to protect herself from jellyfish.
“When you know how hard it is, you kind of want those details,” said Andrew Malinak, a Seattle long-distance swimmer who crunched the data available from the GPS positions tracked on Nyad’s website and concluded that he didn’t trust what he saw.
Nyad’s navigator and one of the swim’s official observers told the Associated Press over the weekend that Nyad didn’t cheat and that she was aided during the rapid part of her swim by a swift current. And neither Nyad nor her team ever said she would follow English Channel rules, developed for swimming the waters between England and France. Those rules outlaw neoprene wetsuits and contact with a support boat. Nyad wore a full non-neoprene bodysuit, gloves, booties and a silicone mask at night, when jellyfish are a particular problem, and removed the suit once she got over the reef on her approach to Key West.
http://youtu.be/Dd9atzCLTnE
See also The Marathon Swimmers Forum here, here, and here
In an entirely different attack, Frontpage Mag writes that Diana Nyad ‘desecrated 50,000 graves’
Many Cubans completed the hundred-mile journey on flotation devices most of us wouldn’t board outside a backyard swimming pool. Many more died horribly in the attempt from dehydration, sunburn, drowning, sharks and machine-gunnings by Diana Nyad’s hosts and facilitators. Diana Nyad describes Castro-regime apparatchik Jose Miguel Diaz Escrich as a “good friend.†Escrich runs the Castro-regime’s Hemingway Marina from where Nyad started her swim and from where the patrol boats and Soviet helicopters would depart to machine-gun desperate freedom-seekers.
Because he can
http://youtu.be/sfN97KE-v7k
The women’s 100 meter butterfly medal podium at the LEN 2012 European Swimming Championships in Debrecen, Hungary. From left to right Sweden’s silver medal winner Martina Granström, Norway’s gold medal winner Ingvild Snildal and Israel’s bronze medal winner Amit Ivri. See the result list here.
See Fox28
While Notre Dame traveled to Michigan over the weekend, a former Wolverine trekked his way to Irish country Saturday.
2012 Gold Medalist Tyler Clary was on hand at the Notre Dame Swim Clinic helping young swimmers learn some new techniques. Clary won the gold in London in the 200M backstroke.
“It’s so cool to come in and do what we love to do, which is swim,” said Clary. “I get to teach kids to swim which is special for me because I’ve been in the position before where I’ve learned from people who’ve come back from the Olympics”
“Alessandro De Rose made his Cliff Diving World Series Debut back in July, during the fourth stop of the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series in Malcesine (Italy). Watch and listen on how and why the Italian took up such an extreme sport!”
“And when you see that the water is coming, you stretch your body, you squeeze your bum in and try to stay really tight and look forward, because if you look down, the water will punch and break your mouth”
Nice, now I’m definitely not doing that ! :-P
