International Swimming Hall of Fame Honorees By Year (2018)

The youngest of three girls, Rebecca Adlington naturally wanted to do what her older sisters did, and the sisters were all swimmers. Before long, her desire to keep up with them made her into a serious competitor.

When Amanda Beard started serious training as an 11-year old, no one could have imagined that this California girl, whose role model was the flamboyant bad boy of basketball, Dennis Rodman, would become America’s best female breaststroker at the tender age of 13. Training under coach Dave Salo at Novaquatics Swim Club, her progress was so meteoric that she skipped Junior Nationals, jumping directly from competing against 12-year olds to the Senior Nationals.

For over 50 years, the International Swimming Hall of Fame (ISHOF) has recognized a category of honorees known as “contributors.” They are the unsung heroes who have used their talents and work behind the scenes to positively impact the aquatic sports and help create platforms for others to achieve fame and glory.

Joy Cushman was born into an aquatic family that had a summer beach house in Galveston, Texas. It was there she developed an early love for swimming, fishing, surfing, and waterskiing. Back in Houston during the school year, she joined a swimming team. Like most female swimmers in those days, she performed water ballet routines for her club’s annual water shows, starting in 1939. It was the great heyday of water shows and the Aquacades that helped popularize swimming and make Hall of Famers Johnny Weissmuller, Eleanor Holm, Buster Crabbe and Esther Williams superstars.

Petar Stoychev is unique among all the world’s open water swimmers. Stoychev’s versatility in open water swimming is unprecedented. A superman in the water, he has been able to cross great channels and swim in extreme conditions with water temperatures ranging from 35 to 90 degrees. He was the first swimmer to cross the English Channel in under seven hours.

Bill Sweetenham grew up in poverty in the rural part of Australia, in a place called Mount Isa, a mining town out in the middle of nowhere. He found refuge from this tough environment and from his father’s strict discipline through participation in sports, especially swimming.

Miho Takeda was born and raised in the Kyoto Prefecture on Honshu, Japan’s largest and most populous island. She began swimming at the age of five and turned to synchronized swimming two years later. She changed clubs at the age of thirteen to train under Masayo Imura, the national team coach and “Mother of Japanese Synchro.”

Libby Lenton, joined her first swim team at age four. By age ten, she was one of Queensland’s top age groupers. In 1995, the family moved to Brisbane, where Libby started training under coach John Carew, mentor of Hall of Famer, Kieren Perkins. But in early 2002, Libby began training under coach Stephan Widmar.

Brenda was five years old when her parents, immigrants from northern Mexico, took her to the pool so she wouldn’t be afraid of the water like her mother. After two years on the swim team, they reluctantly allowed her to follow her older brother, Edgar into the rough and tumble sport of water polo. This was before the explosion of girls water polo programs and Brenda practiced with and competed mostly against boys. It didn’t take long for her to realize that she was as good, if not better than most of the boys.