I've never liked swimming

[Talvi]

Unless my french is poorer than I thought those are the words of Laure Manadou:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FE8J4vT46o8

Can't understand the rest really but it seems ... sad?

(is she lifting her head to breathe? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vbel...ature=youtu.be)

[davidprice]

Talvi,
I think you're right. In a few frames, viewed from below, her head disappears when she turns her head to breathe. It may be more prominent when she breathes on her left side.

Do you suppose that swimmers at that level, not my problem of course, develop a style of carrying their torso higher in the water, almost like planing like a speed boat?
comments..?

Dave P.

[terry]

Talvi
It strikes me as sad too, but I understand. For too many 'high-stakes' swimmers, swimming does come to seem like a job--one that unfortunately has elements of assembly-line repetition. It doesn't have to be that way, but too much of their training is unimaginative.

[andyinnorway]

I love her catch!!!

It's a shame that our strongest bodies are paired with our undeveloped minds. I'd love to train my 18 year old body with my 41 year old mind.

[Danny]

Originally Posted by andyinnorway

I love her catch!!!

It's a shame that our strongest bodies are paired with our undeveloped minds. I'd love to train my 18 year old body with my 41 year old mind.

Was it George Bernard Shaw who said that youth is wasted on the young?

[Talvi]

Originally Posted by andyinnorway

I love her catch!!!...

Hadn't really focused on it until now, thanks Andy, that right arm shot is a real education. I'd been watching her 2bk, and the way her "passive" leg drifts back up after kicking.

Finally got out skiing yesterday (and today, yaaaaay!!), and it made me think about the "undeveloped ones", in particular those 3yr olds in their penguin suits who learn to ski after doing it for about 50m! Five hundred thousand metres after starting to learn, very late in life, I'm still trying to get the hang of it! Undeveloped minds have a lot going for them.

It's tough trying to be sane in an insane world though. That was the obsevation passed onto me about 30 yrs ago by an "oldie". He'd probably been around the age I am now and was telling me of an oldie telling him, thirty years before, that: "In my day we tried to be insane in a sane world, now you are trying to be sane in an insane world."

It is surely an indictment when something so beautiful is crushed by people trusted to know better than we, those with "developed" minds. I don't know Manadou's story, but Larkin's immortal words seem to me to apply to every member of the older generation not just parents:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

Then again ..... :D

[s.sciame]

Originally Posted by andyinnorway

I love her catch!!!

Me too, it looks so light and easy. Same for the pull. She seems to care only about the rhythm, and all the rest just happens