The IV Panamerican Master Championships starts next Tuesday, Nov. 8th, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This time it will have, besides swimming (pool and open water), also diving, synchronized swimming and water polo competitions.
Total number of registered competitors up to 2500 of which 1656 in swimming (919 from Brazil, 178 from Argentina and also 47 from the USA).
This is the largest Panamerican event up to now, and one of the largest ever held in the Americas (with the exception of the FINA World Championships)
Next one, the V Panamerican competition is scheduled for 2013 in Sarasota, FL.
I had planned to go to this meet. What could be better than to go to a meet in Rio? Unfortunately I broke both shoulders skiing in March and was not able to go.
I guess it will be a long time before it gets back to Rio ... so it goes.
It sounds like it was a great meet. Results can be found at www.abmn.org.br/.../resultados.php
The Open Water event is tomorrow, with almost 800 entrants!
I am in the Dallas airport waiting to board my flight back to Philly. The Pan Ams were a great meet. They were well run and the facilities were pretty good. The Open Water 3K was also a unique experience. There were about 400 men. We started in maybe a 20 by 20 meter area on the beach and it seemed like we stayed that way for the first 600M of the race. There was a lot of contact, Latin Americans take OW seriously and no one would give an inch. After the race, they had an awards ceremony for the top 10 in each age group. After a week of competition we all pretty much knew each other and getting up on the medals stand was a great experience, everyone was cheering and I have never seen that much enthusiasm at any US Nationals. It was a something that I will never forget. Sarasota will host the Pan Ams in 2013. I think they can have an even bigger and better meet and BTW, Rio is unbelievable!
BTW, Rio is unbelievable!
Now I really feel bad.
I am glad you enjoyed the meet - it looked like it would be a lot of fun. I am afraid that by the time it is held there again, I will be too old to enjoy it.
International meets are quite an experience. The Worlds in Italy will be nice next year, but I really think that Rio was a unique experience.
Torino is the only other international meet that I have tenatively planned. My brother married a girl fromTorino so I will have friends to visit while there. I also age up that year - so if I can keep from breaking something right before the meet, I plan to go.
Everyone seems to have good things to say about the Worlds when they are in Italy. With the weak dollar Italy will be expensive. Rio was also expensive but but not out of line w/ the cost of the Worlds in Stanford in 2006. Everyday in Rio I experienced something new. It was a vacation, an International meet and an educational experience. It was worth the money.
Jack,
In the panam event in Rio I saw that many USMS swimmers did participate. I wonder how and if we could have our results considered for the USMS LMC rankings this year?
Jim,
The results in PDF format is in the ABMN site:
www.abmn.org.br/.../2011111707579.pdf
It is in Portuguese, and it may be hard to separate the 40 or 50 USMS swimmers from the 1650 that have participated in the event.
I was just going to email my times and a link, to our DV Top 10 guy. The Pan Am times will be listed for the 2012 season I think, so there is plenty of time. I think somewhere in those PDF files is a list of swimmers by country. Could you copy that list and go through the results and run a program that can find their name on the results documents? I think there were 45 Americans at the Pan Ams. Many of us know each other. I know the guys in my age group, Martin, Walker, Miller, Sicard just for starters. It shouldn't be too hard to figure it out, even if you have to do it manually.
