The aim of this study was to assess stroke rate variability in elite female swimmers (200-m events, all four techniques) by comparing the semi-finalists at the Athens 2004 Olympic Games (n = 64) and semi-finalists at the French National 2004 Championship (n = 64). Since swimming speed (V) is the product of stroke rate (SR) and stroke length (SL), these three variables and the coefficient of var...

Monitoring the performance is a crucial task for elite sports during both training and competition. Velocity is the key parameter of performance in swimming, but swimming performance evaluation remains immature due to the complexities of measurements in water. The purpose of this study is to use a single inertial measurement unit (IMU) to estimate front crawl velocity. Thirty swimmers, equipped...

At a time when the memory of Herbert Marcuse is fresh in the minds of many on the left, it is perhaps particularly fitting to focus our attention on the special place held in Marcuse's thought by the concept of memory. Many of his earlier commentators have, in fact, already noted its importance.' One of the more astute of their number, Fredric Jameson, even went so far as to claim that the theo...

Human swimming is a challenging problem to simulate using computational fluid dynamics because of the combination of turbulent flow; complex free surface motion including splashing and entrainment of gas; and rapidly deforming swimmer geometry. The mesh-free Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) technique is ideally suited to overcome many of these difficulties. Initial simulations of towing us...