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Hackett Twins Will Swim - For Safety

Feb 6, 2012  - Craig Lord

News Round-Up:

Australia: 1500m ironman Grant Hackett tells the Aussie media today that he does not expect his two-year-old twins to grow up and break world records in the pool like he did, if only because dad may not be able to stomach all those 5am starts to get the kids to the pool. The offspring of the 2000 and 2004 Olympic 1500m champion will, however, will swim, will have the skills needed to avoid drowning. "Everyone goes, 'oh are they going to be champions one day?'" said Hackett. "I really don't care to get up at quarter to five to take them to training but I do care they know how to swim and they know how to look after themselves in the water." Hackett was helping Olympic 100m free silver medallist Eamon Sullivan to launch Swim Kids Operation 10,000 Down Under, a program designed to ensure the money is available to get thousands of disadvantaged children in the swim to safety through an initiative run by Australia's Royal Life Saving Society and long-time swim sponsor Uncle Tobys.

On This Day in Olympic Year: On this day 56 years ago, East and West Germany agreed to send a joint team to the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne. The trend would last through the 1960 and 1964 Olympic Games before East and West would go their own ways. After the division of Germany in the wake of the Second World War, few nations had the stomach to witness a "Germany" team race as one and the 1948 London Games went without German representation. East German authorities of the Nationales Olympisches Komitee für Ostdeutschland refused to send athletes to the 1952 Games in a united all-Germany team and an application to send and East Germany team was rejected by the IOC. Between 1956 and 1964, the Équipe Unifiée d'Allemagne (EUA) brought all Germans together. Within 10 years of East Germany going it alone, State Plan 14:25 was underway and involved a mass doping programme in which Oral Turinabol, a steroid, and related products that had not been put through clinical trials nor tested on animals, were administered systematically to teenage athletes. Recovered Stasi documents provide clear evidence that all GDR women who won swimming gold medals between 1976 and 1988 had been administered performance-enhancing substances.

Estonia: researchers led by T. Salumae at Tallinn University, report in the Journal of Bionic Engineering: "Biological evidence suggests that fish use mostly anterior muscles for steady swimming while the caudal part of the body is passive and, acting as a carrier of energy, transfers the momentum to the surrounding water. Inspired by those findings we hypothesize that certain swimming patterns can be achieved without copying the distributed actuation mechanism of fish but rather using a single actuator at the anterior part to create the travelling wave. To test the hypothesis a pitching flexible fin made of silicone rubber and silicone foam was designed by copying the stiffness distribution profile and geometry of a rainbow trout. The kinematics of the fin was compared to that of a steadily swimming trout. Fin's propulsive wave length and tail-beat amplitude were determined while it was actuated by a single servo motor. Results showed that the propulsive wave length and tail-beat amplitude of a steadily swimming 50 cm rainbow trout was achieved with our biomimetic fin while stimulated using certain actuation parameters (frequency 2.31 Hz and amplitude 6.6 degrees)." The report concludes: "The study concluded that fish-like swimming can be achieved by mimicking the stiffness and geometry of a rainbow trout and disregarding the details of the actuation mechanism." Food for thought in a world of swimming that will soon hear more about the relevance of the above to speed and excellence in the race pool.