Global Marathon Swimming Awards 2015 - FINALISTS
We are pleased to announce the finalists for the 2015 MSF Global Marathon Swimming Awards.
For more information, please see the dedicated page:
http://marathonswimmers.org/awards/2015/finalists
Solo Swim of the Year (Female)
Chloё McCardel - English Channel 3-way
Jaimie Monahan - Lake Geneva
Kimberley Chambers - Farallones to Golden Gate
Marcy MacDonald - Loch Ness
Margarita "Tita" Llorens - Mallorca Channel
Solo Swim of the Year (Male)
Andrew Malinak - Strait of Juan de Fuca
Bill Shipp - Catalina Channel
David Barra - Cayuga Lake
Jason Betley - Catalina Channel 2-way
Barra Award for Best Overall Year (Female)
Bridgette Hobart
Jaimie Monahan
Sarah Thomas
Barra Award for Best Overall Year (Male)
Andrew Malinak
Craig Lenning
Mark Sheridan
Streeter Award for Service to Marathon Swimming
Craig Lenning
Dan Simonelli
Eileen Burke
Phil White
Suzie Dods
Yudovin Award for Most Adventurous Swim
Dave Van Mouwerik - Estero Bay
Jen Dutton - Keuka Lake "A-B-C" swim
Peter Hayden - Santa Barbara Island circumnavigation and return to Catalina Island
Wendy Trehiou - St Malo to Jersey
Relay of the Year
Arch Academy Zombie Patrol - Santa Barbara Island to Anacapa Island
Deep Enders - San Nicolas Island to mainland
Old Men and the Sea - oldest Catalina Channel relay
Statement on Transparency of Process (one of the founding principles of the MSF Awards):
To the greatest extent possible, and with only a few exceptions, finalists were selected from the pool of Forum-generated nominations, on the basis of community support (as quantified by "likes").
It was an incredible year for women in marathon swimming, and not surprisingly there were plenty of nominations of women for both Solo Swim and Barra Award.
To the community-generated Female Solo nominations, we added Tita Llorens' unprecedented 84 km (52 mile) crossing of the Mallorca Channel in Spain. This swim was mentioned in the Forum by @mauprieto but perhaps under-appreciated here due to the Spanish-language news coverage and documentation.
Wendy Trehiou was nominated in both Solo Swim and Yudovin Award. In keeping with previous policy, the same swim can be a finalist for either Solo OR Yudovin, but not both. In this case, she is a Yudovin finalist.
Female Barra finalists are the top three community-generated nominations.
Male Solo Swim nominations were sparse this year. To the two community-generated nominations, we added @malinaka's Juan de Fuca swim and @david_barra's Cayuga Lake swim.
Male Barra finalists are the top three community-generated nominations.
Streeter finalists are the top five community-generated nominations.
Yudovin finalists are the three community-generated nominations, plus Peter Hayden, whom we transferred from Solo Swim with the consent of his anonymous nominator. We felt the "lollipop" swim was a better fit for the "most adventurous" category. The nomination of the Loch Ness swims (collectively) was ineligible because the category is specifically defined for individuals, not groups.
Relay finalists are the top three community-generated nominations.
Comments
The vote is now live. An email with a personalized link to the voting website has been sent to each Forum member at the email address with which you registered for the Forum. We do this to ensure a fair vote (one member, one vote) -- or at least more fair than a process allowing unlimited votes by your high-school alumni list (cough).
If you have a sbcglobal.net, pacbell.net, bellsouth.net, or att.net email address -- your ISP is blocking emails from our server, and we will have to send them to you manually. Please be patient.
If you did not receive an email from 'Marathon Swimmers Federation' with the address of awards2015 [at] marathonswimmers [dot] org and a subject of 'Your personal link to vote in the MSF Marathon Swimming Awards', please check your Spam or Junk folder.
If you still can't find your email, or have any questions, please send me a message.
Thanks for participating!
OK, all the 'Ma Bell' addresses have received their voting tokens now.
The token is embedded in the link contained in the email. The link should take you right to the first page of the survey (Solo of the Year). If instead you get a page asking you to enter your token, simply cut and paste the token from the link.
In the link, your token is between the sid/525231/ and the /lang/en
If you intend to vote, please do so as soon as possible. We will shut it down as soon as a couple days go by without any new votes.
Thanks @Niek.
The short answer is, every ISP or email provider has a slightly different algorithm for identifying spam messages, and the one used by AT&T and its subsidiary companies is dumber than the others.
In the past three years we've done these awards, we haven't disclosed the vote percentage each finalist received. Because, I suppose, we didn't want a relatively small vote percentage to detract from the good feelings of being nominated, or being a finalist.
But I also note that @Munatones discloses vote totals for his WOWSA awards, and personally I felt a sort of perverse pride in the 37 votes I received this year for the SwimTrack app, compared to the multi-thousands received by the category winner LOL
Anyway, we're open to other ideas on this. Do people want to know the vote percentages? Any thoughts on the issue?
Nope.
We're all just carbon, water, starlight, oxygen and dreams
No.
The MSF community is quite small. It would be too divisive. I don't think it would be fair for any of these amazing finalists to find out that they only received (e.g.) 2% of a vote.
Yeah, I agree with not publishing. It's a small community and to be honest, just because I voted for one thing over another, it wasn't like I thought some people's accomplishment were amazing and others' not. Choosing was HARD.
As a nominee, I'd rather not know. :-)
Thanks for the feedback, folks, which confirms our initial sense. We'll keep it as before.
As a first-time voter, it was incredibly inspiring to read the accomplishments of each one of the nominees. I truly appreciate the nominating process, too. By marathon (or aspiring) swimmers for marathon swimmers. Awesome! Cheers!
What about "perverse pride"?!
Awards voting will close at 11:59pm GMT this Friday, January 22.
Questions or technical support issues? Please send me a message.