International Swimming Hall of Fame Honorees By Year (2011)

Re Calcaterra was born in 1915 in St. Louis, an area where she lived all her life. In this landlocked state of Missouri, swimming was not on the minds of most people especially after the dirty- water swimming conditions where many athletes became ill at the 1904 St Louis Olympic Games only eleven years earlier. After high school graduation, she went to work as a secretary atthe Brown Shoe Company in St. Louis. Soon married, she took her daughter, Roz, to the YMCA, teaching her to swim at a young age. A few years later, she attended a synchronised swimming clinic and in 1948, at the St. Louis Downtown YMCA, she organized the Clayton Shaw Park Synchronized Swimming Team, which she coached for more than 50 years; producing two national champions, one being daughter Roz, syn­chro's first nomination for the Sullivan Award.

Tom Hoad was a Western Australia State Butterfly Champion from 1950 to 1954, but his love for the water was in water polo. For over 60 years, he helped keep Australia in the forefront of world water polo, first as a player, then as a coach.

Born in Budapest 1954, Denes Kemeny began playing water polo at the young age of six. For the next 21 years, he played for six teams making the Hungarian National Team from 1974 to 1986 and competed in over 17 international games for his country.

Leonid “Lenny” Krayzelburg was born in Odessa, the Soviet Union. After spending his boyhood years in what is now the Ukraine, his family immigrated to the United States to escape Soviet Jewish anti Semitism and the call of the Soviet army, settling in a Soviet Jewish enclave in Los Angeles. This soft spoken Russian, a product of the Soviet sports system, wanted to continue his swimming in America, training first at the Jewish Community Center and eventually at the University of Southern California and Trojan Swim Club with coaches Bruce Becker at the Westside JCC, Stu Blumkin at Santa Monica College and Mark Schubert at USC.

Mike Read was an English school-boy butterfly champion who earned a position on Great Britain's 1960 OlympicTeam in the 4x200 meter freestyle relay. But he loved swimming in the open water and between 1960 and 2000, he swam in more than 150 Brit­ish Long Distance Swimming Association Championships setting more than 25 records. He was the 25 Kilometer Lake Windermere International Champion in 1970 and the first person to swim four lengths of Lake Windermere in succession, a total of 42 miles in 26 hours. In total, Michael Read has completed England's longest lake Windermere 39 times.

Yugoslavia's Partizan Water Polo Club produced many great water polo players over the years including: Hall of Famers Zoran Jankovic, Ciro Kovacic, Igor Milanovic, and Mirko Sandie. In 1975, at the age of eleven, Alexandar Sostar joined the club. In his 16 years with the club and another 10 years withfour other clubs, he developed into one of the world's greatest water polo goal keepers of all time. At 6 feet 5 inches tall weighing 225 pounds, he kept the opposing team from scoring goals, deflecting many shots on goal. At the 1988 Seoul Olympics, Yugoslavia won the gold medal, losing only one game in the tournament, and defeating the USA in the final round.

Miya Tachibana grew up in Otsu, Shiga, Japan loving the water so much that by the fourth grade, she was competing in synchronized swimming. By high school, she was winning the Junior World Cham­pionships.