Lane 1 - The Insider posts "U.S. Olympic Swim Team Finds Nemo in 3D. Training for the U.S. Olympic swim team is well underway in Knoxville, Tennessee, and although their schedule is full of demanding tasks, it's just as impressive to hear what they won't be doing. The Insider's 13-year-old correspondent Lauren Kaplan got the scoop on what kind of sacrifices these athletes have to make for a shot at being a champion."
Lane 2 - WRCB posts (w/video) "Georgia swimming well-represented at London Olympics. "Everybody on the team is great, but you always have that Georgia bond," said first-time Olympian Shannon Vreeland. "Once a Bulldog, always a Bulldog." Jack Bauerle is the tie that binds them. The top dawg of UGA swimming is the winningest active NCAA coach and a four-time national champion. This year he has five current or former Georgia swimmers heading to the London Olympics on Team USA. "It's no secret why Jack keeps putting kids on the Olympic team," said three-time Olympian Kara Lynn Joyce, a former Bulldog. "He certainly knows what he's doing over there."
Lane 3 - Sierra Club posts "TRENDSETTER: NATALIE COUGHLIN. Swimmer Natalie Coughlin, 29, was the most decorated female athlete at both the 2004 Athens and the 2008 Beijing Olympics. In Beijing, she became the first U.S. woman to medal six times during a single Games, giving her a lifetime total of 11. She hopes to add to that number this summer at the 30th Olympiad in London. Besides swimming, Coughlin's passions include food, gardening, and the five chickens she keeps in her backyard in Lafayette, California."
Lane 4 - nine asks (w/gallery) "Why swimmers shave their hair? If the sight of James Magnussen arriving in England this week did one thing, it wasn't just ignite the hopes of Australians on the eve of the London Olympics. Many of us were left wondering where all that hair came from?"
Lane 5 - reuters posts "Swimsuits that turn athletes into barracudas. The sharkskin has been retired. The swim bladder, too. For London's Olympic swimmers, the watchword is more "barracuda". Swimsuit makers have long sought inspiration in the oceans, where evolution spent about 500 million years sculpting bodies shaped to cut through the water with the least drag or studded with features that increase speed. That led some manufacturers earlier this decade to develop full-body, impermeable suits: water could not get in and air could not get out, trapping air inside and increasing buoyancy much as fish's swim bladders do."
Lane 6 - The Independent posts "Sink-or-swim time for Australian athletes. In the first in a series looking at the main medal contenders for London 2012, Robin Scott-Elliot assesses the Australians, who have their smallest Olympic team for 20 years – but are looking worryingly good in the pool and on the track."
Lane 7 - Tri-City Herald posts (w/video via NBC) "Olympic star Phelps deals with drag in pool, Recently, the Science 360 website had a story on the basic challenge all swimmers face -- the drag that acts to slow a person's movement through the water. Thrust is the force that pushes a swimmer forward, while drag opposes that movement."
Lane 8 - Smithsonian Magazine posts "The Swimsuit Series, Part 4: A Competitive Swimmer’s Musings. Artist and author Leanne Shapton trained for the Olympic swimming trials as a teenager. Her newest book, Swimming Studies, which was released this month, is a quiet, weightless and elegant collection of stories about the life of a swimmer who is inescapably drawn to the water even after she is no longer rigorously competing. To continue Threaded’s Swimsuit Series, and with the Summer Olympics around the corner, I’ve excerpted part of her chapter “Bathing” along with some of the book’s images of Shapton’s swimsuits and their accompanying provenances."
