SWIMMING
Frank Keating
One of sport’s most intense and antique challenges is reaching its high-season fulfilment. It is an international sporting contest famed throughout the world and a more ancient one than any organised by soccer. It is older than cricket’s Ashes (established 1884) or tennis’s Wimbledon (1877). It remains unimpeachably amateur and has been open to any man, woman or child since it was legendarily established in 1875. A competitor squares up solely against himself and the extreme forces of nature. Its sole prize, which has to be paid for by any winner, is a copperplate legend on a scroll of fake vellum. Yet its rare achievement remains one of the most holy of grails.
The English Channel swimming season is at its zenith in the next few weeks, carried on the final neap-tide swell of blowsy summer. By aeroplane or ferryboat, the 33,6km sea crossing between Dover and Calais has long been a routine journey a drink and a blink and you’re over. For swimmers, it represents a torturedly self-absorbing, cruelly excruciating obsession. They cannot leave alone its enthralling horrors and this month and next they will be greasing themselves up and going at it again with an almost diabolic self-abasement.
Many thousands have accepted the challenge but it has been achieved, solo and by the end of last summer’s season, only 640 times (England to France) and 195 times (France to England). The fastest to cross was the American Chad Hunderby, at 7hr 17min in 1994, the slowest his compatriot Henry Sullivan, at 26hr 50min in 1923. The oldest to wade totteringly but triumphantly ashore was Clifford Batt, an Australian aged 67 and 240 days in 1987 (18hr 37min) and the youngest Britain’s Thomas Gregory, only 11 years 11 months (nicely 11hr 54min) in 1988 since when the age limit was sensibly raised to 16 by the ever-vigilant Channel Swimming Association (CSA).
With the last swim of last summer, the intrepid 51-year-old London journalist Kevin Murphy successfully completed the 640th crossing and his own astonishing 32nd, which had him crowned “King of the Channel” by the previous monarch and present CSA chairman Mike Read, who had logged 31 crossings in his glorious, brave and dotty obsession. This month Murphy failed after 10 hours in his attempt to post 33 crossings. He was hauled out in severe discomfort, scarcely able to mutter: “I’ll be back. I just have to put more clear water between myself and Mike.”
This summer, when a July tide presented an opportunity, China became the 48th country to post a successful swimmer when the Beijing University lecturer Zhang Jian crossed in 11hr 56min accompanied by a flotilla of television boats beaming live satellite pictures back to Beijing. In his classic Folkestone fishing boat Mary Mayne, CSA secretary Duncan Taylor was escort pilot that day. “Halfway through, Zhang Zian had a feeding stop. He was handed out a bowl of noodles and, treading water, in the middle of the Channel he ate them with a pair of chopsticks. What TV pictures that must have made back in China.”
On August 11 a Swiss swimmer, Ueli Staub (37), became just the fourth fatality since 1954.