Fran Crippen Passes away

[missjackiechan]

Really sad news, just read that Fran Crippen (26) has died during the FINA World Cup Open Water 10k in UAE.

http://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com...news/25369.asp

[lane4]

This is awful news, a total tragedy.

[KatieBun]

What a dreadful thing to happen.

[selkie]

An utter shock to hear about this. Hopefully this spurs FINA to put much tougher safety standards in place for open water racing.

[LAZy]

Surprises me that officials didn't see what was happening - fine line between freedom in open water swimming and over regulation I know but general observation seems imperative.

[Leprechaun]

Originally Posted by LAZy

Surprises me that officials didn't see what was happening - fine line between freedom in open water swimming and over regulation I know but general observation seems imperative.

It seems amazing that for all the officials they have, no one counted them passing buoys

I can assure any newcomers and wannabees it is much more closely monitored and there is almost an obsessional approach to counting swimmers at uk open water events

[Warm Water]

Terrible tragedy. I wonder how much affect the water temperature had? I tried to swim in Dubai during May and had to give up after 100m, I just couldnt relax and get into a rythmn, I hated it. Way too warm.

[Dave_G]

One tends to associate this kind of tragedy with cold water, not warm. I suppose if one has this sort of medical condition, though, it can happen anywhere. However, it is a very sad occurrence.

[Leprechaun]

Originally Posted by Dave_G

One tends to associate this kind of tragedy with cold water, not warm. I suppose if one has this sort of medical condition, though, it can happen anywhere. However, it is a very sad occurrence.

Agreed. But the speed these guys are going at for a 10K swim is pretty serious, I think its 5K/hr which makes efitz and Manic-P look a bit pedestrian (he more than she, I'll grant). At that level of effort there wouldnt be much cooling in water as warm as that reported. And the air would probably have been nearly as hot...Sounds absolutely awful as a swimming environment and I guess the ability to cool is even worse than in a marathon run.

Beats me how they didnt have enough of the simple checks in place in terms of numbers of swimmers passing checkpoints.

[selkie]

There are a lot of swimmers, including some of the biggest names in the sport, who are going on the record with how poorly the event was run and how there were essentially no safety boats on course. Craig Lord's doing a good job of much-needed stirring of the pot on the web front, and I've even seen swimmers on CNN slamming meet management over conditions.

[NotVeryFast]

Originally Posted by Leprechaun

Agreed. But the speed these guys are going at for a 10K swim is pretty serious, I think its 5K/hr which makes efitz and Manic-P look a bit pedestrian (he more than she, I'll grant). At that level of effort there wouldnt be much cooling in water as warm as that reported.

And the cooling requirement is related to the absolute workload rather than the workload relative to an individual's ability. So if two people are both working at max effort, the one who is outputting the most power has a higher cooling requirement. The top swimmers in the world could easily be outputting in the region of 50% more power than someone like efitz.

[ambresolaire]

Originally Posted by Dave_G

One tends to associate this kind of tragedy with cold water, not warm. I suppose if one has this sort of medical condition, though, it can happen anywhere. However, it is a very sad occurrence.

What medical condition?

[ambresolaire]

One tends to associate this kind of tragedy with cold water, not warm. I suppose if one has this sort of medical condition, though, it can happen anywhere. However, it is a very sad occurrence.

I'm still wondering what medical condition is being referred to. I've read a lot today about the death of Fran Crippen and there's no mention anywhere of an existing medical condition. Please explain.

[selkie]

No firm cause of death yet (and I wouldn't trust an autopsy done in the UAE at this point) but a lot of these kinds of deaths do end up being caused by an underlying medical condition where the first sign of trouble is frequently sudden death. There have been big name athletes in that age band dying young because of an aortic dissection/undiagnosed Marfan's syndrome (killed basketball players Hank Gathers and volleyball player Flo Hyman on the court) cardiac hypertrophy, and the like.

And if you're going to speculate, then those are areas of speculation that history shows may be part of the sad equation.

[ambresolaire]

Originally Posted by selkie

No firm cause of death yet (and I wouldn't trust an autopsy done in the UAE at this point) but a lot of these kinds of deaths do end up being caused by an underlying medical condition where the first sign of trouble is frequently sudden death. There have been big name athletes in that age band dying young because of an aortic dissection/undiagnosed Marfan's syndrome (killed basketball players Hank Gathers and volleyball player Flo Hyman on the court) cardiac hypertrophy, and the like.

And if you're going to speculate, then those are areas of speculation that history shows may be part of the sad equation.

I wasn't trying to speculate (I actually think it's a bit distasteful to speculate on the cause of death at this point), but was instead just trying to clarify the statement made by a previous poster. I've seen no suggestion of an underlying medical condition mentioned in any of the news reports and wondered where that suggestion had come from.