- Title: FRANCE: DAVID MECA JUST FAILS TO BREAK ENGLISH CHANNEL SWIM
- Date: 29th August 2005
- Summary: CALAIS, FRANCE (AUGUST 29, 2005) 1. DAVID MECA APPROACHING FOLLOWED BY PILOT BOAT WITH ENGLISH COASTLINE OF "WHITE CLIFFS OF DOVER" IN THE BACKGROUND 2. MAN WITH BINOCULARS LOOKING OUT TO SEA 3. MECA AND VYETTA HLAVACOVA SWIMMING TOWARDS SHORE 4. PEOPLE WATCHING 5. MECA REACHES SHORE AND CELEBRATES WITH HLAVACOVA 6. (Soundbite) (English) MECA "It was a great swim. It was very tough conditions but just recently we won the gold medal at the world championships and that really helped me in the bad moments because here you feel very lonely, very cold, very tired, and I think this kind of race is just for superheroes." 7. MECA AND HLAVACOVA SWIM BACK TO PILOT BOAT 8. (Soundbite) (Spanish) MECA REPEATS HIS ANSWER IN SPANISH 9. MECA AND HLAVACOVA CLIMBING ONTO PILOT BOAT FOR RETURN TRIP TO ENGLAND Initials Script is copyright Reuters Limited. All rights reserved
- Embargoed: 13th September 2005 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: CALAIS, FRANCE
- Country: France
- Reuters ID: LVA6ZZ6FFPT20AFMG88EPQ9071T8
- Story Text: David Meca of Spain just fails to break the English
Channel Association's record for swimming across the
English Channel.
World championship gold medallist David Meca failed
by just four minutes on Monday (August 29, 2005) to break the
English Channel Association's record for swimming across
the English Channel. The Spaniard took seven hours and
twenty-two minutes to swim from Folkstone in England to
Calais in France, a distance of around 21 miles (32
kilometres).
Meca was paced along the way by Czech swimmer Yvetta
Hlavacova who joined him in the water on several occasions
during the crossing. Early in August, Hlavacova herself set
a new Czech record for swimming the English Channel with a
time of eight hours 42 minutes.
The English Channel Association's record is seven hours
17 minutes set by Chad Hunderby in 1994.
However, the fastest reported swim my a man across the
Channel was made earlier this month when Christof
Wandratsch of Germany swam from Dover to Calais in just
seven hours and three minutes under the scrutiny of the
Channel Swimming and Piloting Federation.
Meca was Spain's only gold medallist at the Montreal
world championships where the thirty-one-year-old won the
25 kilometres open water category.
The first person to swim the English channel was
Captain Matthew Webb in 1875. Webb's ordeal took a
gruelling 22 hours and made him an instant hero in
Victorian Britain.
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