Olympics: men’s 10k marathon swim

How the sport works

Twenty five competitors swim six laps approximately one mile each, totaling 10,000 meters. The first one to slap the finish board after completing the distance wins.

The marathoner in me takes issue with a race shorter than 26.2 miles being labeled a marathon, but swimming for ten kilometers has got to be incredibly grueling, so I'll let it pass.

A few of us got to the Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park early enough to grab a spot almost directly across from the start.

It takes a long time to swim 10k but it went by surprisingly fast. We cheered for Canadian Richard Weinberger on each lap. He was easy to pick out because he had lost his swimming cap immediately upon diving in at the start of the race so he was the only bareheaded swimmer! He won the bronze medal so we were excited. (We Canadians seem to be pretty happy with winning bronze medals!)

The other swimmer we cheered the most for was Guam's Benjamin Schulte. When we first started cheering for him, we just knew he was from Guam and in dead last place. Another spectator told us his name was Benjamin, so we cheered even harder for dear Benjamin once we knew his name. He finished last, just under ten minutes slower than the penultimate swimmer.

One of the best features of the marathon swim is that, like cyclists or marathon runners, the swimmers feed during their race. The coaches all line up on a dock and use poles or cheap robot-style grabbers to pass their swimmer a beverage. Each pole/grabber has a national flag on it so swimmers know which drink to grab. (Some counties have invested more in their beverage devices than others, like the countries with a red plastic cup at the end of their pole, like the kind of cup you would use if you were playing beer pong at a frat house.) The swimmer then flips onto his back like an otter and basically throws the drink at his face, hoping some of it lands in his mouth.

Medal results

Gold: Oussama Mellouli, Tunisia

Silver: Thomas Lurz, Germany

Bronze: Richard Weinberger, Canada

As we made our way out of the park, we spotted two men in Kazakh team gear, one of whom had the drinking cup sticking out of his backpack. As we stalked–I mean, walked–behind the pair, we couldn't tell if one of them was the swimmer or if they were both coaches, so, feeling shy, I snapped a quick picture and didn't bother them. When we got home and looked at the picture, we realized the man on the right had a swimmer's number on his hand. He was the Kazakh swimmer and we didn't talk to him! Oops.