Swimmer's Daily

  • South African backstroker Charlene Wittstock met Prince Albert II, the sovereign of Monaco, at the Mare Nostrum 2000 meet in Monaco. She participated in the 2000 Sydney Olympics, moved to the principality in 2006, retired from swimming in 2007, and is now to marry the prince on July 1st and 2nd 2011. Here is a bit of background on CBS News, and Wikipedia of course has a lot about both her, the prince and the wedding.

  • Evelyn McMurray Van-Zeller is selling her Manhattan mansion for just under $11 million, including this living room with built-in pool, six bedrooms, a garden, a gym, a sauna, five bathrooms, five fireplaces and a second pool for the owner’s turtles. ‘You fell like you’re on a permanent holiday’, she says, ‘there is almost no reason to leave the house (with) the pool, the sauna (and) the gym’. In my view not a place for people with small children, but maybe an idea for those who need to stay up till late, because as she says, ‘if you fall off, you fall into the pool’. Via MailOnline, The Wall Street Journal and (if you want to buy) CORE.

  • Yesterday, 52-year-old Elizabeth Fry swam the 17.5 miles from Battery Park in Manhattan to Sandy Hook, NJ, in only 4 hours, 59 minutes and 2 seconds, 7 minutes and 2 seconds faster than the record set by Australia’s Tammy van Wisse in 2006. And then she swam back, becoming the first person ever to complete the 35-mile round.trip. Read the New York Post and NYDailyNews.com

  • Police say the driver of an AT&T truck ran off the road after going into a diabetic coma. With the man unconscious, the truck crashed through a backyard fence and into a pool where 12 people were swimming, including kids. Luckily, nobody was hurt. Source abc7.com.

  • Penny Palfrey was released from hospital Tuesday morning after being hospitalised for a day and a half from her epic 40 hour and 41 minute swim from Little Cayman to Grand Cayman. “The swelling is already gone and she’s starting to look like herself”, her husband Chris Palfrey said Monday evening. Turns out now afterwards that three Oceanic white tip shark were killed, because they were very aggressive and would have continued to threaten the swimmer.

    Local sealife conservationist Guy Harvey said he thought the fact that the sharks were killed was a shame and excessive, but acknowledged that they were “a real threat”.

    “People had to anticipate that fact that the Oceanic white tip shark are an integral part of the oceanic environment there. They should have thought about that,” he said. He said the white tips usually bump up against a swimmer again and again “to test and see and then take a bite”.

    The swimmer had told her team that she had been bumped in the dark several times as she swam through Saturday night.

    A kayak and inflatable power boat beside her each carried a Shark Shield that emits electrical pulses to repel sharks, but it appeared at least one of the sharks got closer than the 26 feet of protection it was meant to provide.

    Read more here on compasscayman.com.

  • Troll alert, while swimmers get to buy tickets for only one family member at the London 2012 Aquatics Centre, and others like Rebecca Adlington’s parents have been cheated out of theirs, the Libyan regime has successfully requested close to 1,000 tickets, co-ordinated by the Gaddafi family. The Mayor of London describes is as “successful” that he himself didn’t get a ticket, while The Telegraph now speculates that Col. Gaddafi himself may try to disrupt the event as a publicity coup, if he remains in power in 2012.

    Update: The Guardian writes here that the Libyan tickets will be held back until closer to London 2012, and that no Gaddafi will be let into the country. Via Gold Medal Mel.

  • Butterfly looks difficult, but maybe one could manage a couple of kilometers of crawl. See www.michaelphelpsswimspa.com. Via the17thman.

  • Swimming or not, Shanghai resident Wang Kang is too cool to be missed, even though he apparently only built his Ironman Mark 1 suit in order to scare the bejesus out of his telecom coworkers. Via laughingsquid.com.

  • Video here from Penny Palfrey’s swim between Little Cayman and Grand Cayman, and from the moment when she walked ashore after more than 40 gruelling hours in the sea. She beat the existing record for longest solo unassisted ocean swim by four miles, so that it now stands at 67.25 miles (108.22 km), but her face was unrecognisable from so many hours in the salt water, and she could hardly talk because her tongue and lips were so badly swollen. Not she is quite okay, though, tells compasscayman.com.


    Marathon Swimmer Breaks World Record by tvnportal

    A nice touch was that she was shadowed by a shark, the entire night :-S

    “One of the white tip sharks, it just shadowed me the entire night – I could see it sort of five feet away, maybe more,” she said.

    “I had the (electronic) shark shield on so it was just outside the range of the shark shield and it was just cruising underneath me all night long.”