Picture or logo (in case of an organization)

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• Ideally this shows the face without goggles or sunglasses.  Grandchildren should recognize a face and a swimmer can show their friends the IMSHOF Honoree they met in the past. Please help if you have a better photo especially for the following:  Lyndon Dunsbee, David Morgan, Joe Grossman and Reg Brickell Sr. 

 

• Please send us a better/different photo if the photo in the biography is low resolution, can’t see the face, too many others in the photo or the rights are owned by a photographic image agency.  Even use your smartphone to take a picture of a photo in your scrapbook.

 

• Some good photo examples for IMSHOF Honoree biographies:  Maarten van der Weijden, Val Parsons and Petar Stoychev.

 

• Photo sizes sometimes adjusted to get a single page biography or create a better break between the pages.  The minimum description used:  which one was the IMSHOF Honoree (left and right as you are looking at the photo), the only others identified are IMSHOF Honorees or IMSHOF Patrons and the setting not described (one more thing to get wrong).  Please let us know if we need to credit the photographer. 

 

• For IMSHOF Honor Organizations – this should the current logo.

 

Website Links

A link to a Personal or Organization website is given when available.  This should have a direct connection with the Honoree or sport of marathon swimming (as opposed for example to a general product/service offering). Please advise us if you have a more current website address. 

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Biography in the English language

An overview of the career – not every swim/contribution.  Please suggest additions, deletions, edits, etc.

 

American English spellings used except where there were local titles in England such as Honourable Secretary.  Each section should start with the Honoree name in 14 point Arial Bold.  For consistency and to help those from outside the sport, distances shown in the style 10 km (not 10K) and times as 14 hours and 11 minutes (not 14:11 or 14hr 11min).

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Very few swims of less than 10 km listed and relays only where significant:  record, involving disabled swimmers, etc.  Tenses were modified (from “He is the Chairperson…” to “He was the Chairperson…”).  Mentions of records were modified to “set the record” versus “holds the record”.  In the case of IMSHOF Honoree Mohamed Ahmed Marouf, as he has held the Zurich record for decades, it says “remains unbeaten still in 2019”.  The phrase "world records" is not used for marathon swimming.  It is use for pool swimming, Masters and other sports.  Limited reference to Guinness Book of World Records is used in biographies written before 2022 - and not encouraged as Honorees hold many hundreds of such records.

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IMSHOF tries not to mention any individuals who are not Honorees in the website.  This hopefully avoids any claims about "being in IMSHOF".

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IMSHOF has only one category for swimmers - Honorees and doesn't attempt to rank them further.  IMSHOF does not attempt to form a top 10 list or name "greatest of all time" as done by other sports.   The use of words:  "greatest", "dominant" and "dominated" is very limited as a result and generally refers to a specific era, country, event or other factor.

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Traditional swimming marathon definitions include 10 km, 10 miles and 25 km.   IMSHOF prefers to include the shortest possible swim distances (as opposed to swim path) for all swims and doesn't use the term "ultra"except where it is included in branding names such as:  FINA UltraMarathon Swimming Series and UltraEbre Swim Marathon.

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Some IMSHOF Honorees have been inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame and Masters International Swimming Hall of Fame.  These honors are all noted in the biographies without mentioning the specific categories - which will only tend to confuse the reader.

 

Note to all – please suggest updates (after induction) for new big swims (like IMSHOF Honoree Sarah Thomas’ 4- way English Channel), receipt of new awards or contributions to the sport (like a FINA position, raised money for charity, etc.)

 

As part of a broader branding campaign, we describe others using the style “IMSHOF Honoree Attila Molnar”.   We are proud of the sport’s inclusion of swimmers with “disabilities” – so we ensure consistent use of this descriptive word. Finally, the IMSHOF’s mission is to maintain a dynamic shrine dedicated to the history and recognition of marathon swimmers and contributors - not the place for controversy so we omitted disputed swims – as an example a claimed swim from Catalina which was not ratified by the Catalina Channel Swimming Federation.

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The final decision to edit/add to a biography sits with IMSHOF.  IMSHOF always avoids

controversy - so any achievements/contributions which are subject to sport discussion will not be included.   Some swimmers have completed 100+ marathons and the goal of a biography is an overview.   Some Honorees ended up with longer biographies over the history of the website.  IMSHOF doesn't plan on reducing the size of these biographies but will generally not offer a similar size to others.

 

Links to two other data sources – all are encouraged to try and make these as accurate and complete as possible by working directly with these sites:

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Expanded Biography (Openwaterpedia)

A WIKI page managed by IMSHOF Honoree Steven Muñatones - email: headCoach@openwatersource.com  Steven continually looks for historic information and current activities of IMSHOF Honorees to publish in https://openwaterswimming.com/  and link to your WIKI page. He welcomes your suggested additions, corrections, stories and contact in general.

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Long Swim Database (Marathon Swimmers Federation)

Many IMSHOF Honorees (as well as other swimmers/events) have their marathon swims/events in this database.  At a high level, the swimmer generally needs to have three or more confirmed swims and elite races need a have a full race list (it is not enough to know that one swimmer got silver). 

 

The general requirements are described in https://db.marathonswimmers.org/about/  with contact links near the bottom of the page.  As an example, IMSHOF Honoree Colin Hill (without a listing) has done three or more marathons.  If Colin wants a listing, he needs to contact the swim organizers and make sure his results are on their webpages or to scan/digitize the full swim data and access the contact link.

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Translations into the native language of the IMSHOF Honoree

Thank you to the volunteers who did the translations.  Please suggest any improvements.

 

A big thanks to IMSHOF Honoree Steven Muñatones who researched and assembled much of the content of the first website much of which carried through to this, our third, website.

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Run your own statistics

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Much of the material in this website is included in a spreadsheet to help those who want to run their own analysis of the data.  Some of the hyperlinks have not translated well - will try and fix for late 2023 version.  Download here

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