Swimmer's Daily

  • At the Canadian Olympic trials yesterday, Brittany MacLean clocked 4:06.08 in the women’s 400 freestyle to lower the previous mark of 4:07.32 set by Brittany Reimer at the 2005 world championships in Montreal. MacLean qualified easily for the Olympics, along with Savannah King in 4:07.02. Scott Dickens qualified with a 1:00.42 in the men’s 100 breaststroke, Alec Page and Blake Worsley with 4:17.78 and 4:23.22 in the men’s 400 IM, and Katerine Savard with a 58.45 in the women’s 100 butterfly. Read more here on swimming.ca.

  • It took Vasili Krapivin 50 seconds to swim 25 meters during an open tournament in Sochi, Russia, having had the category “100 years or older” added to the swimming championships program especially for him. Born in 1912, he worked in the coal mines from the age of 18, graduated from the Tomsk Polytechnical Institute in 1936, but was sent to labor camps for 20 years for anti-Soviet propaganda, unable to ever find out specifically what he was imprisoned for, with no trial and all. Mining gold an tine ore in Kolyma, Siberia, meeting his quota fully, he would receive the full ration of 900 grams of bread, which enabled him to survive. “They have 12 months of winter there, and the rest of the time it’s summer”, the 100-year-old swimmer said about his imprisonment, with a laugh.

    And by the way, he believes there is no special secret to long life: You just have to get up every morning at 6:00 a.m., run down to the sea, take a swim, and run back again.

    Hats off to Krapivin!

    Read more here on Russia Beyond the Headlines

  • Czech swimmer Michal Rubacek has been suspended two years for testing positive for the banned stimulant methylhexanamine at the Czech championshipos in December 2011, meaning he will miss the London Olympics after competing at the games in Athens and Beijing. He holds the Czech records in the 50 and 100 meter butterfly. Read more here on The Washington Post.

  • At the “Broadcasters’ Meeting” yesterday, it was revealed that the surroundings of the Debrecen 2012 European Swimming Championships pool will be covered with temporary grandstands for the athletes and media, as part of the struggle to have as many seats as possible for the fans.

    László Szakadáti, director of LEN said: “The pool is not very big but it is going to be made big by the event. On behalf of LEN we must be grateful to the Hungarian for electing the adventure – sticking with their traditions – and accepted the organization of this event three months prior to the opening ceremony. They knew what they undertook and we knew they were probably the only federation capable of pulling off such a feat on a high level.”

    (more…)

  • A smart looking Frédérick Bousquet on deck at the FINA 2009 World Aquatics Championships in Rome, Italy. Jeez, I can’t get over that he missed out on the London 2012 Olympics.

    Frederick Bousquet

  • The Canadian Olympic & Paralympic Swimming Trials started today, and will be streamed live here on swimcanweb.tv until Sunday, April 1, prelims from 10 AM and finals from 7 PM local time in Montreal (that’s 14:00 and 23:00 UTC), with video on demand available also. Visit www.swimtrials.ca for all kinds of details, including schedule, live results and browsable start lists and results. I’m looking forward to Cochrane’s 1500 on Sunday.

  • Zach Wilson, an adventure sports enthusiast and film-maker was paddle-boarding off North Carolina’s Outer Banks in May of last year with a friend, when his GoPro digital camera went missing. Ten months later, on February 28, he got an unexpected surprise when the friend he was with at the time spotted what he thought was an image of Wilson, posted here on REAL Watersports facebook page. And yes, it was his, having travelled 24 kilometres from where he had lost it, complete with 1200 pictures of crabs and stuff on the memory card because of it being set to take a picture every five seconds. Brilliant! Read more here on ctv.ca.

  • In a remarkable performance on 3rd night of the State New Zealand Swim Championships, Matthew Stanley, Steven Kent, Dylan Dunlop-Barrett and Andrew McMillan smashed the New Zealand record and gave themselves an outstanding chance to earn an invitation to the London Olympics.

    The quartet, the fastest four individuals in the 200m freestyle final, went 7:14.05 in the 4x200m freestyle relay which was seven seconds under the old national record, but more importantly posting a time that would have placed them 10th in the world last year.

    Twelve teams have already qualified for the Olympics, with the next four fastest nations at the end of the qualifying period in early June to earn selection.

    (more…)

  • Shooting footage for a 3-D movie and a National Geographic special, filmmaker James Cameron journeyed to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean on Sunday, seven miles below the surface. Tom Clarke of Independent Television News reports on Cameron’s deep dive to the Mariana Trench’s Challenge Deep, 300 miles southwest of Guam. “He set off in the middle of the night, but it makes no difference when you’re heading to the darkest place on Earth.”

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