Swimmer's Daily

  • A photo taken with my Sony Handycam during the 2008 European Junior Swimming Championships opening ceremony in Belgrade, Serbia. See www.tasmajdan.rs

    DSC00377

  • Leisel Jones who is attempting to become the first Australian to compete at four Games revealed Tuesday that she had been battling an ear infection since the New South Wales titles last month, where she was well below her best. She says her ear is “95 percent” but admits it is not the ideal lead-up to the trials, with 100 meter breaststroke staring on Friday.

    “Being a swimmer, it’s definitely not ideal to have a middle ear infection because it just doesn’t get better,” the Olympic breaststroke champion told reporters on Tuesday, saying she had been trying to fight off the problem for two to three weeks.

    “It affected my balance, it still does a little, so it’s probably not really ideal but we’ve done the best we can.

    “I’ll be holding on to the blocks very, very tightly so, if you see me wobble outside the pool, I’m not drunk – I’m just a little bit off balance.”

    Via The Chicago Tribune and ABC

  • Beaches off Perth, Australia, were closed Monday because of the sighting by a helicopter crew of a massive shark feeding frenzy. Video footage shows dozens of sharks, mostly blacktip and bronze whalers, in a spectacular assault on schooling bait fish and small tuna. See GrindTV

  • Pretty good video here shot on an iPhone 4 at the British Olympic Trials on Friday, 9 March 2012. If you look closely, you’ll notice a flash of red light on one of the center lanes at 0:31, that must be the light signal that Craig Lord mentions here on SwimNews:

    The first swimmer home gets one light, the second two, the third three, while the lights do not come on for any other lanes. The effect is immediate, so in a 50m dash in which 0.02sec splits the first three men home, the winner can been identified more quickly by the instant light show on the blocks just above the place that everyone is watching rather than the display on the scoreboard.

  • “Dual Olympian Geoff Huegill talks about the evolution of the Australian Swimming Team, mentoring athletes and his almighty comeback. Skippy talks about the Olympic trials and his key rivals.” Via the17thman

  • Funny commercial here promoting the not-so-funny Australian food paste thingy called Vegemite. Tried it while staying in Shetland back in 1988, still remember the taste.

  • Two-time Olympic gold medal winner Kieren Perkins dismisses those criticising the support Ian Thorpe has received in his comeback, saying “You couldn’t buy the publicity, the television coverage, the front and back-page articles that Ian’s return has generated, all these guys whingeing about the money … I think as long as Swimming Australia was using the money appropriately and transparently, there simply isni’t a problem.” Another interesting note in the article here on the Australian:

    At 38, he has no grey whiskers to stroke while he muses over how things were better in his day. But the reality is that things really were better in his day.

    There was more money in the sport, thanks in no small way to Telstra’s massive sponsorship, swimmers were among Australia’s highest-profile athletes – not just Thorpe and Perkins but also Grant Hackett, Michael Klim, Susie O’Neill, Samantha Riley, Hayley Lewis, Leisel Jones … the list goes on – and even their coaches became household names. And television ratings just kept going through the roof.

    (more…)

  • The Chinese team well equipped with gongs and banners on the final night of the Rome 2009 World Aquatics Championships.

    Chinese fans at Roma 2009

  • Wow, AMAZING footage here courtesy of the International Swimming Hall of Fame: “The 1936 Olympic final of the 200 meter breaststroke showcased three distinct styles of swimming the stroke at the time. American, John Higgins demonstrated the butterfly arm pull with the frog kick. Hamuro and Koike of Japan, and Sietas of Germany all used the traditional head-up breaststroke. Ito of Japan used a full arm pull with underwater recovery. After the war, the breaststroke used by Higgins was the preferred style. It wasn’t until after the 1952 Olympic Games that butterfly became a distinct stroke.”