Poliana okimoto biography examples

Twenty-six women raced a ten-kilometre course this morning in the choppy aquamarine waters off Copacabana Beach, completing the last of the Olympic women’s swimming events, and the only one not held in a pool. (The men will follow tomorrow.) It was a fitting conclusion to the past week’s exhilarating and historic indoor aquatic performances. Although marathon swimming, as the contest is known, only became an Olympic event in 2008, at the Beijing Games, it nods to the sport’s ancient origins more than anything that happens now in a pool. It is also, arguably, much harder. Pool swimming is a spectacle of perfection, with each competitor alone in a lane, exhibiting peak mastery of one of the sport’s four strokes—backstroke, breaststroke, butterfly, or freestyle. Open-water swimming is cruder, less elegant, more primal. The women racing today, for roughly two hours, had to contend physically and psychologically not only with the elements—a strong opposing current, wind chop on the surface, a blazing sun, water high in bacteria—but also with one another, ceaselessly, right up to the last hundredth of a second.

Open-water swimming tends to conjure up images of impassioned loners silently stroking across the sea, in search of glory or transcendence. (Or love, as in Ovid’s story of Leander, who swam across the Hellespont each night to see Hero, guided by the torch lighting her tower.) But marathon swimming is not so much meditative as combative. In stunning aerial shots of Copacabana this morning, a flotilla of support dinghies and kayaks surrounded what resembled a white rip in the bay’s shifting navy fabric, like the wake following an invisible ship. Yet, when the camera switched to a surface-level closeup, it revealed a packed scrum of capped-and-goggled heads and windmilling, criss-crossing arms amid a

The latest issue of Swimming World Magazine
is now available for download in theSwimming World Vault!

Non-Subscribers Can Download This Issue Here

By Dan D’Addona and David Rieder

[Photo Courtesy: Kareem Elgazzar / USA Today Sports]

Ana Marcela Cunha continues to be the world’s most dominant woman in open water, capturing Swimming World’s Female Open Water Swimmer of the Year title in 2019 and 2021. (Because of the COVID pandemic, the award was not presented in 2020.)

In the biggest race of the past five years, the Brazilian star was at her best at this past summer’s Tokyo Olympic Games, surging to the 10K open water gold medal.

Twenty-five women qualified for the race, which began at Odaiba Marine Park.

She didn’t lead from the outset. In fact, she didn’t even lead for most of the course. It was Ashley Twichell who set the pace and led for most of the race, but Cunha swam right with the American. Germany’s Leonie Beck went into the top group on Lap 6 of the seven-lap course, but once Cunha got back in front early in the final lap, she never surrendered the lead.

But it wasn’t as simple as all of that.

As Cunha tried to break away late in the race, two swimmers managed to stay close: the Netherlands’ Sharon van Rouwendaal and Australia’s Kareena Lee. Van Rouwendaal, the defending gold medalist from the 2016 Olympics in Rio, had a similar race strategy as Cunha and used a late surge to earn the silver medal in Tokyo.

In fact, after nearly two hours of swimming, Cunha was able to maintain her body-length lead over van Rouwendaal, getting to the touchpad just 9-tenths ahead of her Dutch rival, 1:59:30.8 to 1:59:31.7—and only 1.7 seconds ahead of Lee at 1:59:32.5.

The gold was Cunha’s first-ever Olympic medal and the second-ever medal for Brazil in open water, as Poliana Okimoto took bronze at Rio.
“This is m

Adam Skolnick is an award-winning journalist who has written about travel, culture, human rights, sports, and the environment for The New York Times, Playboy, Outside, BBC.com, ESPN.com, Men’s Health, Wired, and Longreads, among others.

But it is his expressive and illuminating descriptions of the open water world that have always caught our attention.

Skolnick is the author of ONE BREATH: Freediving, Death and the Quest to Shatter Human Limits and he has covered open water swimming several times for the New York Times.

His features include Antonio Argüelles‘ journey to become the seventh person to complete the Oceans Seven, Kimberley Chambers‘ attempt to swim the length of the Sacramento River, and a profile of Jim McConica and The Deep Enders‘ channel swimming relay.

For more information on his books, visit ONE BREATH and INDOLIRIUM.

Skolnick will moderate a panel discussion among the Oceans Seven swimmers at the 2018 WOWSA Talks & WOWSA Awards on November 9th – 10th at The Olympic Club in San Francisco, California. “There is no one better to interview these luminaries in the sport,” says Steven Munatones. “These swimmers are articulate, engaging and entertaining as they explain their motivations to swim and their challenges along the way. What these swimmers face in their preparations and how they eventually succeed in their swims are applicable to normal and unexpected challenges faced by many people on dryland. 

And Adam is the best at identifying and drawing out the motivations and stories behind their achievements and obstacles whether it is psychological, physiological, logistical or emotional.”

The speakers include:

Lewis Pugh – UK
Swimming for Change
Lewis is a former maritime lawyer from the UK, one of the world’s leading ocean advocates from his home base in Cape Town, and an open water swimmer with a long