Swimmer's Daily

  • Great Britain’s swimmers have decided to skip the Olympic opening ceremony, to no surprise really given that the competition in the pool starts the next day. The swimming team made the decision themselves. “One of the things about this team is the swimmers get a lot of input into our preparation,” medley swimmer James Goddard said. “As a group of swimmers we sat down with Michael Scott [the performance director] and a couple of other members of staff and we decided as a team not to go to the opening ceremony. As a team we decided that was best for our performances.” Read The Guardian

    Aand they will certainly not be the only swimmers doing this: “Between them, Michael Phelps and Natalie Coughlin have appeared in seven Olympics and not a single opening ceremony. Blame the schedule; the first swimming events take place the morning after the long night’s march.” Read The New York Times

  • Former Olympic swim coach Ger Doyle has been handed a six-and-a-half year jail term for 34 counts of indecent assault and one count of sexual assault against 5 children during the years from 1981 to 1993. Doyle showed no remorse and pleaded his innocence throughout accusing the victims of telling “a pack of lies.” Read Independent.ie

  • Norway’s Sara Nordenstam before the women’s 200 breaststroke semifinal at the Debrecen 2012 European Swimming Championships. She went on to win the event in 2:26.91.

    A focused Sara Nordenstam at Debrecen 2012

  • USA Swimming has requested an emergency disciplinary hearing against prominent Washington area swimming coach Rick Curl for allegedly engaging in a sexual relationship with a teen swimmer and then paying her and her parents to keep quiet as part of a settlement. Kelley Currin, whose maiden name was Kelley Davies, said Curl had sexual relations with her for four years beginning in 1983, when she was 13 and he 33. Curl coached Tom Dolan to Olympic gold in the 1996 and 2000 Olympics, and was the American Swimming Coaches Association Coach of the Year in 1994. Read The Washington Post and see ABC News

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  • Former Olympians have leapt to the defence of champion swimmer Leisel Jones, who has come under fire today for her physical appearance just days before competition kicks off in London. Head coach Leigh Nugent says he has had a face-to-face meeting with Jones that convinced him that these attacks have not rattled her mental state. Read for instance The Sydney Morning Herald and Courier Mail

  • Reuters has had an interesting talk with Denis Cotterell, coach of 1500 favorite Sun Yang:

    “There’s a lot of Hackett in Sun,” a tired Cotterell told Reuters in a phone call from his flat in the Athletes’ Village.

    “He has a lot of passion for the sport and a passion for speed.

    “We’ll see whether he can be tough as Grant. He’s superior technically but toughness is a rarer quality.

    Sun Yang and Pál Joensen before the Shanghai 2011 men's 800 freestyle

  • Omega OSB11Never mind ‘statistical anomalies‘ and what have you; there were many ties at the Debrecen 2012 European Swimming Championships, but according to Omega only because they are not allowed to time the athletes to the 1/10,100th of a second. Read Reuters:

    “We had in the European championships a lot of discussions about the ties,” he explained poolside on Wednesday as Olympic hopefuls went through their training routines in the lanes behind him.

    Huerzeler said Omega had done more detailed analysis of those ties with their data and discovered that, timed to 1/1,000th of a second, only one remained. At 1/10,000th there were none.

    And no, it wouldn’t be a good idea to go below the hundredth of a second:

    “They are talking about measuring the thousandths again but that is not correct,” said Huerzeler. “One thousandth of a second is 1.7 millimetres.

    “And who gives me the guarantee that each lane in the construction of a pool is precise to the millimetre? The tolerances in the pool are in centimetres…the thousandth is only feasible if everybody is swimming in the same line.”

    As an engineer, I’m with the Omega man on this one. Also because he has an awesome name :-P

    DSC_0136

    (Pretty sure the Moon landings were a statistical anomaly too)

  • This video is from a near death incident as SeaWorld San Diego back in 2006, when the killer whale Kasatka attacked her trainer Ken Peters presumably because she heard a distress call from her calf in a backstage pool. Peters suffers a broken foot but remains eerily calm, finally managing to free himself, only to have Kasatka charge him over the barrier net. The video has no sound, btw. Read for instance Mail Online, CBS News and 9News

  • England-based graffiti artist (and political activist) Banksy‘s view on I guess the Starstreak missile system protection of Olympic athletes. There is an even harsher one here on his site, I guess on third-world outsourcing and stuff.

    Via Neatorama