Swimmer's Daily

  • Michael Phelps on how he sleeps in an altitude chamber. Warning: Annoying background music.

  • They had a chance of qualifying for the Olympics, Iceland’s Eygló Ósk Gústafsdóttir, Hrafnhildur Lúthersdóttir, Sarah Blake Bateman and Eva Hannesdóttir. It didn’t go all as planned, but they put an awesome fight, placed 5th and today June 6th it is official that they have qualified. Áfram Ísland!

    Iceland ladies before the 2012 Debrecen 4x100 medley relay

  • This morning at the Mare Nostrum Canet prelims, Sydney 2000 Olympic Champion Lars Frölander went on to the finals with a 52.36 in the 100 butterfly, fastest of all there and 10th fastest of his career. Most likely qualified for the Olympic Games in London, according to simma.nu/se.

    DSC03315

  • Despite having given up on extra-hard Olympic qualification standards, the international competition especially in Europe has increased so dramatically, that it never has been harder for a Danish athlete to qualify for the Olympic Games. According to Danish Olympic Chef De Mission Jesper Frigast Larsen, those selected are doing so good, injury-free and training well, that they now might increase the London 2012 medal expectations from the original 7 medals across all sports.

    “I will not deny that it promises to be the best Danish Olympics ever. Over the next 14 days we’ll go through all disciplines and revise our medal target.”

    Danish sports media sporten.dk yesterday made an interesting rating of those athletes already selected for the Danish Olympic team, grouping them into 4 categories from medal contenders to ‘far-from-medals’. Here below I list only the swimmers, see the full list on sporten.dk

    1. It smells of metal: Lotte Friis, Jeanette Ottesen
    2. Perhaps – on a good day: Pál Joensen
    3. Trainees: Mie Ø. Nielsen, Pernille Blume, menn 4×200 frí
    4. Far from medals: Mads Glæsner, Rikke Møller Pedersen

    (Danes announcing their medal expectations back in January)

  • “Some Things Are Really Simple (Sommige Dingen Zijn Heel Eenvoudig)” is a claustrophobic film about a young father, Wout, who takes his identity from his hobby: swimming underwater. One day, Wout arrives at his home and finds his place in his family taken by another man. That is, a man his own age is cooking for his wife and child. See culture unplugged

  • The 29-year-old King County woman who said that her coach molested her while she was on an Oak Harbor swim team nearly 18 years ago will receive a $1.5 million settlement from the North Whidbey Park and Recreation District to compensate for the abuse, according to her lawyers. Read The Seattle Times

  • Nice comment by the Olympic champion Oussama Mellouli on AZ Daily Sun

    “It’s been kind of crazy because this is the first time I’m doing triples, which is three workouts a day,” said Mellouli, who won the gold medal in the 1,500-meter freestyle for his native Tunisia at the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

    Even for a world-class athlete like Mellouli, whose body is trained to go farther, faster and harder than most people could ever dream of going, the training schedule can be taxing.

    “Some of the guys on the team went to check (the Grand Canyon) out yesterday, but I was just too tired, I wanted to stay in the hotel and relax.”

    Pál og Kaibab í Grand Canyon

    (No break for Pál, he was on assignment for my geologist brother Bartal)

  • As in Budapest, the organizers of the Debrecen 2012 Europeans (and T-Mobile?) had arranged for this bus to be available, complete with computers and everything for teams to get on the internet. For some reason though empty, every time I went there.

    The Debrecen 2012 team internet center

  • Phoenix police yesterday shot and killed a young man who became belligerent after having been turned away from a city swimming pool, threatening people and then charging the officers with with a baseball bat. AZ Central via USA Today.