Contents
Introduction
Keep those Records Coming
Report from the World Masters in Italy
Beds Masters Decathlon Challenge 2012 - Progress
Beds Masters Volunteers at the London 2012 Olympics
Opening of "Inspire: Luton Sports Village" / 50M Pool

Introduction
Dear Bedfordshire Masters Swimmer, these newsletters are like London buses. For a long time nothing comes, then you get two at once. And that's thanks to contributions from readers, Chris Jessup and Rita Egan both of South Beds Masters for sending reports on the World Masters and their Volunteering for the London 2012 Olympic Games. Note that these are the views of individual swimmers and that Beds ASA bears no responsibility for the accuracy of the articles.

Keep those Records Coming
Keith Spence (South Beds Masters) our Records Keeper has been busy establishing the Beds Masters Relay Records, which should be online shortly with the individual records at: http://www.bedscountyasa.com/swim_records See bottom of page below other county records.
You will note that there are many opportunities for clubs that can raise a team of four to grab vacant records. There aren't separate sets of relay records for short and long course. During 2012 there has been a steady flow of new records, so keep them coming. Claim forms are online and can be emailed to Keith.

Report from the World Masters in Italy
From Chris Jessup:
Riccione is a little bit south of Rimini on the East coast of Italy. It is a seaside town geared up for sports of all sorts. It is a well known cycling area.

Liz Neale (3 events), Annie Wilson and Chris Jessup (5 events) took part from South Beds Masters Club.

Riccione has lovely sandy beaches, which are mainly taken over by the nearby hotels unfortunately with rows and rows of sunbeds etc. But you can walk along the sea edge at all points.

On my way to the hotel dragging my bag behind me in the heat and looking at my map, I checked with a local to make sure I was in the right place. We had no common language but I was reassured. Then he pulled out a bottle of apple juice and gave it to me. I was very thankful.

On entering my hotel room I was rather taken aback. Its width was slightly less than my outstretched arms. Very small but I got used to it. It did have aircon that worked, as well as a ceiling fan.

There were 12,600 competitors across all the disciplines, which must have done their tourist-trade a lot of good.

The site was very big. Two fields were near the entrance; one full of marquees for food, clothing etc. and organisers of the next European competition in 2013 and the next worlds in Montreal 2014. The other was full of sun beds and shades. Then there was a building containing the indoor 50m pool with plenty of seating for spectators, and a 25m warm up pool (nicknamed the washing machine as it got very full of swimmers). Outdoors there was the same set up plus a diving pool which was also used for the Synchro competitions. A lot of space but it often got incredibly crowded.

The start of the day was 0630 when warm-ups were available for 45 minutes and competition started at 0730.

Some days the swimming did not finish until midnight. This was much later than the estimated times. It seems that there were a lot of people entered who could not achieve the qualifying time and were a long way out (not just a few seconds). These people mainly seemed to be Italian. An example of the problem was in the mens 100m freestyle heats. In the 30-34 age group 173 people got within the qualifying time, 59 were slower than the qualifying time and 31 did not finish/swim.

Apparently in one of the races (not a particularly long one) a competitor took 20 minutes to finish the race. People were trying to get the officials to stop him but they would not.

The opening ceremony involved a march through the town in groups behind the flags of our country. The line up at the start was spread over about 500m. I had taken a union jack umbrella which I put up for the march !

I was in the 200m back and watched the first two heats. Amazingly a man in the 95/99 age group was entered in it. His entry time was 11 minutes but he actually did it a lot faster in 8 minutes.
In the first heat the normal three whistles were blown to tell people to be ready but in fact only 3 out of the 10 swimmers were ready, the rest still taking off track suits etc. However the referee then blew the long whistle and got the three in the water. Then they waited for the rest to be ready which seemed odd to leave people in their 90s in the water for several minutes. Eventually the race got under way.
The second heat was similar except that one of the swimmers who was not ready was found not to have his swimsuit on. So a towel wall was held round him and he was helped into his trunks. Then the race started.

Early in the week I spotted a group of girls waving into the distance without any apparent person they were waving to. Puzzled I moved on. Later in the week I came across other groups of ladies counting loudly and throwing their arms around and then the penny dropped. They were practising their Synchro routine on dry land to get the timing right.

Jane Asher (Kingston Royal) won the 80/84 age group 100m freestyle in a time of 1m 28s, incredibly 16 seconds ahead of the second place swimmer. She would have won the 75/79 age group also.

I met a range of people all of whom were friendly and interesting. Some I have seen in previous world championships and some for the first time.

I discovered for the first time that there is an international Masters motto; "Friendship, Fun & Fitness".

Overall there were 274 water polo matches, 28000 entries in swimming, 2400 open water swimmers, 580 Synchronised swimmers and almost 300 divers.

Apart from the enormous numbers of people in the men’s races in particular, who were a long way out of the qualifying times, it was basically well organised.

The warm up pools were less well supervised than one might hope; no speed ranges for different lanes and people diving in anywhere.

An interesting and enjoyable experience except for my 200m fly race, which was the most painful I can remember. Halfway through my energy seemed to go but somehow I managed to keep going, not get disqualified and just get within the qualifying time.

Congratulations to Annie Wilson who came second in her age group in the Open Water Swim.

Beds Masters Decathlon Challenge 2012 - Progress
We are about halfway through the season and the top five rankings are like this, (national position in brackets) on 5^th June 2012:

Christine Ayers is currently romping away to becoming ladies Decathlon Champ and Janet Masters is also outstanding. In the Men's, there is only a few points difference between the top five, and "dark horses" David Wright (Team Luton) and Chris Jessup (S Beds) are also within striking distance, so it could be any-man's Decathlon Champs.

Beds Masters Volunteers at the London 2012 Olympics
From Chris Jessup who will be helping on poolside at the Olympic Aquatics Centre. This report covers the training days and the test event to try out the pool as a competition venue prior to the Olympics:

This was my second shift on the second training day.

I caught the 0442 train to make sure I had enough time even if there was a delay.

A lot more swimmers came today which was the last training day.

I managed to have a chat with a guy from Omega who was setting up all the timing and found out more about the three red lights on each side of the blocks. Nothing to do with false starts. The aim is to show one light for the winner, two lights for second and three for third as they touch the end. It sounded as if this will be the first event that they have tried it.

There were lots of swimmers and coaches about and most of them were happy to have a chat as long as one was careful about choosing your moment. Also I had to make sure I didn't neglect my role.

There was a group of about 16 swimmers (mid teens) from Manchester who had three adults with them; a physio, coach & team captain. They started with stretching lead by the physio, which took maybe 15 minutes on the poolside. The coach then gave them a session in the competition pool and then took them through to do a warm down in the training pool. He told me he was trying to simulate what they would be going through on the competition day.

A lot of swimmers were using various sculling drills, which was interesting to note.

I met a guy who was a sports analyst. He was a member of a team, which go round the world with the British swimmers. They film our swimmers from the centre of the pool and feed this back to the team room immediately. Then they do all sorts of analyses on the pictures which are fed back later, e.g stroke length versus arm length and how the stroke changes through a race, a very interesting job with a lot of travelling time.

A few groups use stretchy ropes to give resistance to the swimmer, which I had heard of but never seen. They also used these in another way which was to tow the swimmer in from 25m so that the muscles were moving overspeed. They stopped the tow after 15m and the swimmer tried to keep it going to the end. A couple of those were done and then a start, the aim being to get the muscles used to overspeed and condition them to accept it, I was told.

An American breaststroker had a large bushy beard. He told me he started it in December but would be going home to shave it all off that night before his race.

They have an interesting system for storing the lane ropes. There is a foot square tile behind the starting block area, which lifts up to reveal a roller and a wide tube leading to an underground area. It seems you stuff the end of the rope down there and it drops out of site. Presumably there is some way of keeping the end in sight so you can pull it back out !

I probably won't get much chance to see competitive swimming but I am sure I will hear the crowd.

It was my last shift for the test event.
This was morning one and so the competitive part of the day was the morning heats.

I learned a bit more about the disabled swimmers' classifications. S1-S10 mean physical problems with S1 being the worst physical problems. S11-S13 are to do with lack of sight and S14 is learning difficulties. Normally people would race others of the same classification but in this event the races were multi-classification. To sort out the true winners of each heat there is a points system, which equates the world record time in each event/classification combination, equal to 1000 points. A formula uses the swimmer's time relative to the world record to calculate points for his swim. So all the classifications swimming results can be equated to each other. (I hope that makes sense !). It seems a good way to do it, as there is no human judgement about what points should be awarded. The real issue comes in assigning a swimmer to a particular classification, as no two injuries are quite the same. Those of you who swam at Crawley this year may remember a lady with no hands, and legs stopping at her knees, who swam there. It seems that she has been reclassified recently to make her points more difficult to get - to a higher S class than she was.

I had talks with a couple of coaches who train disabled swimmers. For physically disabled swimmers they have to work out with the swimmer the best way to adapt the stroke to their requirements. For S14s, for example, for a lad of 20 with a mental age of 10, there is the need to explain things more simply and perhaps think in a different way. Both coaches found their work was very rewarding and much appreciated by the swimmers.

During the actual swims I was mainly on the poolside doing access control for the athletes/coaches area. A couple of comments came up a few times. First why are we using an announcer with an American accent? Secondly why is there a whole block of seats with hardly anyone in it and looking down at the centre of the pool, when we know the tickets are 'sold out'? It seems British Swimming who organise this event had reserved it for guests of the international swimmers but it did look bad to have probably a couple of hundred seats empty in such a prominent position.

A few other memories - as I was patrolling the pool at warm-up time the little 11 year old girl popped up in front of me and said hello. I had a little chat with her and wished her luck in her 50m freestyle race. I didn't see her race so don't know what happened.

A tall American swimmer who I had talked to before had said he was going to shave off his bushy beard before the race. He came up to me and I could barely recognise him now.

A swimmer came out of the changing area of the warm-up pool, which is half way along one side of the pool. I was aghast to see him dive into the first lane and swim under water across several of the lanes and pop up there. This was a crowded session. I watched carefully and got to the end of his lane but could not stop him the first time as he was tumble turning. Got him next time round and he promised never to do that again. I then had a few minutes talk with him about how his swimming was going which kept the whole thing friendly. He was one of the Belgian swimmers.

I also talked to another coach about how he managed tapering for his swimmers. He starts about 3 weeks prior to a significant competition and drops the amount work down to about a third of the meterage. The aim being to keep the feel of the water, the tuning of the muscles in good shape but making the swimmer come fresh to the races.

What an experience it has all been. The sights, the sounds and the variety of people I came across; competitors, coaches from a wide range of countries, volunteers and paid staff in the running of the competition. I hope the Olympics will be as good or even better. We have to collect our uniform in April. There will be another familiarisation day around the start of July and then up to 20 days of work starting when the Olympic village opens on July 16th. Before that I have to compete in the World Champs in Italy - an exciting year !

From Rita Egan:
I can't compete with Chris's detailed description of job and venue - so I am sending a picture - which I'm told is OK as long as you don't put it on Facebook. I did my final training today (I hope) on the Print Distribution Team - and start work on Sunday. Here I am!

Opening of "Inspire: Luton Sports Village" / 50M Pool
Active Luton, who will be running the new centre, have issued a "Keep in Touch" newsletter about the phased opening arrangements. The "dry side", e.g. sports halls, will open on 20^th August 2012 and the "wet side", i.e. pool related facilities will open from 6am on the 24^th August 2012. There will be an eight lane 50M pool and a 20M pool. Some information is online at http://www.activeluton.co.uk/hydra Prices at Inspire will be in line with prices at Active Luton's other centres.

Paul Clarke (Beds ASA Masters Secretary)
swimsite@freeuk.com
01582 508616