U.S. Olympic medalist Cullen Jones nearly drowned as a child. Today’s he’s one of the world’s best swimmers, and is using his status to encourage more kids to learn how to swim. Cronkite News reporter Amber Harding has the story.
Silver swimmer’s cause hits close to home from Cronkite News on Vimeo.
Speedo Athlete’s Friends and Family Day. Awesome.
Awesome, via InRumor
The Economist has this interesting chart over positive drug tests at the Summer Games up until August 1st 2012, and adds in the article from August 2nd that until then, “two athletes, an Albanian weightlifter and an Uzbek gymnast, have so far been ejected from the London Olympics for failing drugs tests.” Makes you think, eh?
(and if anyone wonders, John Leonard is mentioned, at least twice)
Thursday August 9th, and Open Water Source has this great website ready for us, complete with real-time commentary on Twitter and stuff. Go Paine!
Olympic silver medallist swimmer Michael Jamieson is convinced he has what it takes to become a record breaker.The Scot claimed a shock second place in the 200m breaststroke in London, only missing out on gold thanks to a world-record swim by Hungarian Daniel Gyurta. Read the Daily Record
Doub, I threw this video in the garbage bin back then because it was, well, garbage. But now with almost 2 million views since August 1st, I guess it’s news, via Yahoo! Sports
No, settle down, it wasn’t John Leonard / ASCA, but the (for some of us) lesser Nature, hit hard for attacking Ye Shiwen in the article “Why great Olympic feats raise suspicions“, to the point where their comment system broke down. Having had to change their subtitle because (and I quote) “the original version of the title was unfair to the swimmer Ye Shiwen”, having based their accusations on a 7 seconds improvement that wasn’t since (as they originally wrote) July 2012 but July 2011, before again stressing that “it is wrong to suggest, as many critics do, that we singled her out because of her nationality”.
Nice fail, Nature.
The story’s intention as an Explainer was to examine how science can help resolve debates over extraordinary performances, not to examine those performance statistics in detail. Several analyses done by others convinced us that it was fair to characterize Ye’s performance as ‘anomalous’ — in the sense that it was statistically unusual. But we acknowledge that the combination of errors discussed above and the absence of a more detailed discussion of the statistics (which with hindsight we regret) gave the impression that we were supporting accusations against her, even though this was emphatically not our intention. For that, we apologize to our readers and to Ye Shiwen.
Read Nature, via TwoCircles
