119 Swimmers Entered in Final Olympic Open Water Qualifying Opportunity
This weekend will be the final opportunity for athletes to qualify for the 2016 Olympic open water 10K. 119 swimmers are entered in this weekend’s 10K race in Setúbal, Portugal .
The women’s 10K, which has 51 entrants, will be swum on Saturday. On Sunday, 68 men will take to the 10K course.
Last summer’s World Championships were the first opportunity to qualify for the Rio Games. This weekend, only nations who do not yet have any athletes qualified may qualify a swimmer, with a maximum of one per gender earning an Olympic berth. The top ten finishers in each gender will punch their ticket to Rio, and the next continental finisher for each of the five continents will fill out the remaining five spots, with each nation only allowed to qualify their top athlete in the race.
After the 2015 World Championships, there are ten women and ten men already qualified.
For the women, they are: Haley Anderson (USA), Kalliopi Araouzou (Greece), Rachele Bruni (Italy), Ana Marcela Cunha (Brazil), Isabelle Härle (Germany), Anastasiia Krapivinia (Russia), Aurelie Muller (France), Poliana Okimoto (Brazil), Éva Risztov (Hungary), and Sharon van Rouwendaal (Netherlands).
Already qualified men are: Jack Burnell (Great Britain), Allan Do Carmo (Brazil), Spyridon Gianniotis (Greece), Marc-Antoine Olivier (France), Simone Ruffini (Italy), Sean Ryan (USA), Federico Vanelli (Italy), Ferry Weertman (Netherlands), Richard Weinberger (Canada), and Jordan Wilimovsky (USA).