- Jersey’s longest-running charity event now in its 44th year.
- See our pictures and video from Swimarathon 2015
- Did you know? – Read our quirky facts about the fundraiser
A RECORD number of teams have signed up to take part in this year’s Swimarathon, which raised more than £20,000 on its opening day on Wednesday.
The annual fundraiser – Jersey’s longest-running charity event and now in its 44th year – was opened by the Lieutenant-Governor, General Sir John McColl, at Les Quennevais Sports Centre.
This year, 451 teams have registered to take part in the four-day event, exceeding last year’s record of 432.
In keeping with tradition, the Disabled in Pools Swimmers, a club for people with physical disabilities, were the first in the water to try to complete as many laps of the pool as possible during their 55-minute slot.
This year’s event sees the return of the RBC Challenge Cup, which was introduced by event sponsors RBC Wealth Management in 2012 to encourage Island businesses to take part in the event.
The company has agreed to match the winning team’s sponsorship money by up to £500.
For the past two years the States of Jersey Customs and Immigration Service team has won the cup and has held on to the title by swimming a combined total of 187 laps.
Funds this year will be divided between a number of charitable causes.
Twenty-five per cent of the money raised will go to charities which support people with disabilities; 50 per cent will provide respite holidays and support general community service projects; and the remaining 25 per cent will be donated to the Channel Islands Air Search, a charity with whom event organisers the Lions Club of Jersey and Guernsey have always been closely associated.
Lions Club of Jersey president John Le Maistre said: ‘Since the RBC Challenge Cup was introduced at the Swimarathon it has proved to be a great draw to corporate teams.
‘The cup has been hard fought each year and we are grateful to RBC Wealth Management for all of its support in sponsoring the cup, the wider Swimarathon event, as well as its sterling staff participation.’
After the first day £20,604 had been raised and swimmers had completed 4,658 laps of the pool, the equivalent of 145 miles.
The Swimarathon is due to end on Sunday.
THERE are many annual events in the Island which celebrate Jersey’s strong community spirit, its great support for charity and our appetite to come together for a good cause and have fun.
Over the next few days, we will see all of those qualities in spades as hundreds of people take part in the 44th Swimarathon, once again organised by the Lions Club of Jersey and this year sponsored by RBC Wealth Management.
Bailiffs, past and present, will line up alongside politicians, school pupils, business teams and many more to help raise thousands of pounds for people with disabilities, their carers, Channel Islands Air Search and many other groups and organisations.
Amid the moans and groans that punctuate the pages of this newspaper every day, the Swimarathon provides an opportunity for us all to look up and enjoy a showcase for what is great about our small community.
- The Swimarathon was launched by the Lions Club of Jersey in 1972 as a one-off event. It was thought that sponsored swims would never be as popular as sponsored walks.
- The first Swimarathon was known as the Swimathon.
- For many years the Swimarathon always run in conjunction with the Jersey Swimming Club was expertly managed by the late Harold Michel and his wife Flo, with support from the late Roy and Eileen Horsfall.
- The Swimarathon has attracted many showbusiness personalities including actress Susan Hampshire, who visited the first Swimarathon in 1972. The best remembered celebrity could be the late Roy Castle, who both continually entertained the participants and spectators and managed raise a considerable sum by persuading his audience to part with their loose change time and time again.
- From the mid-1970s and for several years afterwards, the Lions Club of Jersey Swimarathon held the Guinness World Record for money raised from sponsored swimming.
- The Lions Club of Jersey published a How to run a successful Swimarathon handbook which has been given to many organisations across the UK. Among the organisations to have benefited was the British Commonwealth Games Association, who ran a Swimarathon to raise funds for the Edinburgh Games and raised more than a quarter of a million pounds.
- In the 1980s the concept was exported to Guernsey, where a swim is organised jointly by the Lions Club of Guernsey and the Guernsey Round Table.
- In all the years it has been taking place, the Swimarathon has never been postponed. In February 1979, when Jersey shivered under a blanket of snow, swimmers taking part in the 8 am Sunday swim trudged through snow to Fort Regent from as far as St Peter in order not to miss their allotted session.
- Since 2007, the Swimarathon has been sponsored by RBC Wealth Management, who not only sponsor each lap swum by every participating team but have also entered a number of teams
- The greatest number of laps completed within the 55 minutes allowed has been consistently achieved by the Regent Tigers, whose current record stands at 90 laps of the Fort Regent pool. This is likely to last for all time since the configuration at the Les Quennevais pool is different from that at Fort Regent.
- The slowest lap was not even completed by a member of one team who decided that he would walk his laps along the Fort Regent pools bottom while dressed as a Red Indian and smoking a peace pipe. He was pulled out by a Fort Regent lifeguard halfway into his first lap after he had slithered into the deep end and his pipe went out.
