International Swimming Hall of Fame Honorees By Year (2014)

He was born in Nanchang, capital of the Jiangxi province of China in 1981 and began training in diving at the age of six at the Nanchang Sports School. He was selected to be a member of the Jiangxi Provincial Diving Team in 1991, joined the diving team of the PLA Navy in 1995 and became a member of the National Team in 1998.

Like Annette Kellerman before her, this little girl earned her place in swimming history in the water and in the courtroom.

She began her love of swimming at age three. At 11, her older sisters taught her “water ballet” and she was immediately hooked. She loved the music, the creativity, the artistry and best of all, swimming upside down! She then discovered the Washington Athletic Club Synchronized Swimming Team, where she competed through high school. After high school, she moved and competed with the reigning National Champion, Santa Clara Aquamaids. It was with the Aquamaids, she became a National Team champion in 1970.

As his father Ted was getting interested in open water swimming, he took his son to swimming lessons with Chicago Park District’s Ridge Park program. The boy’s rapid progression led him to follow in his father’s wake as a great marathon swimmer.

When Winston Churchill defined success as going from failure to failure without the loss of enthusiasm, he might have been thinking of Mercedes Gleitze.

A great promoter of youth sports and art, Bruce Hopping was born in 1921 in Vietnam. He grew up in Asia and the islands of the South Pacific, where his parents had business interests. When he was ready for high school, his family relocated to the United States, and then, like the rest of his graduating class in high school, he volunteered for the Army at the outbreak of World War II. He became a pilot and while searching for a missing plane, he was forced to ditch his plane into the Pacific. Battling storms, waves, sharks, sunburn and salt sores in a leaky raft, he survived on seagulls that roosted there and washed ashore in the Philippines two weeks later. It was a prime example of Hopping’s perseverance, tenacity and desire to live.

The difference between the impossible and the possible lies in a man’s determination.Open Water Swimmer David Yudovin is known for his determination to conquer waters that have previously been considered unswimmable, and becoming the first person to swim them. But by all rights, he shouldn’t be alive right now. He should have died off the California coast on his 27th birthday in 1978, when he was attempting to be the first person to swim from California’s Anacapa Island to Ventura and went into cardiac arrest just 250 yards from shore.

Born in Budapest, Agnes Kovacs learned to swim when she was just two and a half years old, and loved the water from the very start. When she was just nine years old, her swimming teacher, Bea Szucs recommended she join the program at the Kőér St. Pool where she made rapid progress. At the age of 13 she had her first success in the Hungarian National Age Group Championships and as a fourteen year old, she won the European Junior Championship in the 100 yard breaststroke. Within days of her fifteenth birthday, she won the Olympic bronze medal in the 200 meter breaststroke in Atlanta, in 1996.

She was appointed Knight of the Order of Orang-Nassau in 2011, a chivalric order open to everyone who has earned special merits for society because of her great services to Dutch Water Polo. It is a grade comparable with the ranks of the Order of the British Empire in the UK.

He was introduced early to the water and started swimming competitively at the age of seven to help combat his chronic asthma. A naturally tall and lean kid, Tom Malchow played a little basketball and baseball in grade school, but it was swimming that he showed the most promise. Swimming for coach Paul Lundsten, state, zone and sectional times came easily to him. At St. Thomas Military Academy he held the pool record, in every event except for diving, and was recruited by some of the nations top collegiate programs. He chose Michigan because he liked the coachJon Urbanchek, and the overall program.

Dale Petranech has been a leading figure, promoter, historian and organizer of open water swimming competitions in the United States and around the world for the past 35 years. He has accepted every challenge head on and is well respected internationally for his work.

Enrique Tiraboschi. Lillian Harrison. Jeanette Campbell. Horatio Iglesias. Claudio Plit. These are the great names in Argentine swimming history.

When he wanted to join the local Rowing Club in Durham City as a ten-year old, his mother insisted he should swim first. He liked it so much he took up swimming rather than rowing. Six years later Norman Woods Sarsfield was the city champion.

He started in water polo with the Rowing Club of Naples, moved up to the famed Club Posillipo and became one of the most important players in Neopolitan and Italian water polo history. When he joined the national team in 1992, Italy hadn’t won a gold medal in water polo since 1960 and finished a distant sixth in the 1991 World Championships. But it did have Ratko Rudic, the gruff disciplinarian who coached Yugoslavia to its Olympic championships in 1984 and 1988.

When women’s swimming was added to the Olympic program in 1912, it was inconceivable that women could ever compete equally against men in sports. The impossible became possible when Gertrude Ederle beat the record time of the male Channel swimmers in 1926.

A pair of overweight, uncoordinated twins is the way they describe themselves in elementary school. But when they were eight years old they discovered synchronized swimming; they had a natural talent for it and they loved it. It was the perfect sport for identical twins, swimming like mirrored images.

A pair of overweight, uncoordinated twins is the way they describe themselves in elementary school. But when they were eight years old they discovered synchronized swimming; they had a natural talent for it and they loved it. It was the perfect sport for identical twins, swimming like mirrored images.

In 1926, William Wrigley, Jr., the chewing gum magnate and owner the Santa Catalina Island Co., was looking for ideas that could bring more attention to the island’s mild winter climate. When word came that Gertrude Ederle had swum across the English Channel, Wrigley took note of Ederle’s stunning accomplishment but was particularly fascinated by the ticker-tape parade and worldwide press coverage that followed.