Swimmer's Daily

  • As a major global partner of the 2012 London Olympics, Procter & Gamble is sponsoring not only the entire Australian team, but also Eamon Sullivan, Emily Seebohm and Sophie Edington as ambassadors for Gillette, Pantene and Oral-B respectively.

    [blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/Eamon_Sullivan/status/164544711040839680″]
     
    Explaining its involvement with the Olympics, Maile Carnegie, Managing Director of P&G Australia and New Zealand says: “While we are not in the business of sports, P&G is in the business of helping mums . . . Every Olympic athlete has a mum and mums are with their children every step of the way, nurturing and encouraging them.”

    P&G even went so far as to survey the athletes about mum’s support, finding that, between them, the mums have had over 5,000 early morning starts, travelled 6.5 times around the world and done 11,000 extra loads of washing to support their children’s Olympic dreams. Via bellasugar

    (Great photo of Aussie ‘mumbassadors’ with kids found here on everygirlsanswer.com)

  • “Svimjihøllin í Gundadali” in Tórshavn, Faroe Islands ready for the inaugural annual dual meet between Faroe Islands and Iceland. Only a 25 meter pool, but nicely color-coordinated with lane ropes in Faroese colors and everything.

    Tórshavn's swimming pool ready for the FAR-ISL 2009 Dual Meet

  • Maria-Teresa Solomons demonstrating the Uddiyana Bandha exercise in the video below, an abdominal tonification and purging exercise used in yoga for hundreds of years, recently adopted by freedivers to improve the elimination of air from the lungs, enabling the ribcage to flex and compress more at extreme pressures at depth. Don’t know if pool swimmers can use it for anything, other than the obvious WTF-effect. Via freedivers.net

  • Belgian long distance swimmer Tom Vangeneugden has decided to stop as a professional swimmer, saying here on his blog that ‘There comes a time when you no longer meet your expectations, the goals become unrealistic.’ He is happy with having completed the goals he set as a young swimmer, to compete in the Olympics and swim under 15 minutes in the 1500 freestyle, but now unfortunately it seems he doesn’t meet his own expectations, pointing to the London 2012 Olympics.

    (more…)

  • Garrett McNamara already holds the world record for the biggest wave surfed (90 feet off Nazaré, Portugal in November), but aims for even bigger with his customized wetsuit fitted with a special oxygen pocket by Camelbak, allowing him to breathe through a straw for a few minutes more. Crazy, read TMZ

    He also has a WaveJet surfboard.

    Here is the world record wave surfed, old record was Mike Parsons’ 77 feet from 2008.

  • USA Swimming Sport Diversity Consultant Shaun Anderson catches up with Cullen Jones in between training sessions at the U.S. Training Center in Colorado Springs.

    Quick Minute with Olympic Gold Medalist Cullen Jones from Diversity in Aquatics on Vimeo.

  • Notice, my Italian is no-existent, but the message in this article seems clear enough, even through Google Translate:

    “How was it possible that nobody has ever had suspicions about an individual who went alone to the fields of training and transfers of the company and also slept in the room with this or that guy?”. The question arises whether a reader sent in a letter to the press in recent days about the arrest of Flavio Bomio, ‘former president and former coach of the “swimming Company Bellinzona,” sued for acts of pedophilia.

    The question really if you put it in so many and apparently it seems that many people were in Bellinzona to know if it is true that the day after the news, would appear a banner reading “Everyone knew. Hypocrites.”

    65-year-old Charles Caccialanza used to be a swimming official, noticing strange behavior once or twice, where Bomio was stroking a ‘date’ (this is Google Translate speaking) insistently on the neck and back during two days of competition in Bellinzona and Locarno. Without doing the same to others.

  • Kenyan documentary Papa Shillingi was awarded the prestigious Golden Sea Star at 10. International Underwater Film Festival in Düsseldorf recently. Produced by Volker Bassen together with Katrin Ender, entirely shoot in Diani Beach, Kenya.

    “We wanted the film to promote Kenya as a unique tourist destination. There are no other countries in the world where you can swim with the biggest fish on the planet in the morning, and track the biggest land-animal, the elephant, in the afternoon. It is an unbeatable combination.”

    Via The Star

  • Scientists from EPFL’s Laboratory of Movement Analysis and Measurement (LMAM) have developed waterproof inertial systems to be sewn into full-body swimming suits, equipped with accelerometers and gyroscope, which can analyze the strengths and weaknesses of elite-level swimmers during workout sessions. Parameters are for instance instantaneous swimming speed and coordination, and the swimmer’s gas exchange by using a modified snorkel.

    “This system, called Physilog III, has a number of advantages over the conventional cameras that coaches have been using up to this point,” explains Farzin Dadashi, a PhD student who’s in charge of the project. “A camera can only focus on one swimmer at a time and it takes several days to analyze the data. Worn by the swimmers, our system provides a practical tool to analyze the performance from several athletes simultaneously, and it only takes a few minutes.”

    Read more here on Physorg.com