Americans in the Channel

emkhowley

Hi all- I'm having trouble putting my finger on a statistic I recently came across somewhere about the number of Americans who've ever swum the English Channel. I have in my head that it should be around 400 American solo swimmers total since 1875, but I'm looking for confirmation or a more accurate figure. I have found two reference points:

First, from the CSA. When I run a query on their swimmer database I get 2018 Americans. That's great, but I'm pretty sure that doesn't include swimmers who swam under the auspices of the CS&PF, which, in the 15 years they've been in operation is a probably a fair number of Americans. Another 50? 75? More? Does anyone know the number of American swimmers CS&PF has escorted over the years?

I also see this on the Dover.uk site:

there have been a total of 3,951 Channel swims, with 1,832 swimmers completing 2,369 solo swims.

32% of solo swims have been made by swimmers from the UK, 17% from the USA and 9% from Australia.

If I'm understanding that correctly, we'd be talking about 311 swimmers, right?

Can anyone provide me with a more solid number that includes ALL Americans from both organizations?
Thanks!
Elaine

evmo

@emkhowley said:
First, from the CSA. When I run a query on their swimmer database I get 2018 [typo?] Americans.
Can anyone provide me with a more solid number that includes ALL Americans from both organizations?

It's important to distinguish between EC swims by Americans from Americans who have swum the EC - the latter is a smaller number due to individuals who have swum it more than once.

A query of LongSwimsDB gives 374 distinct Americans who've swum the English Channel solo. This includes CSA, CS&PF, the Butlins races, and the Daily Mail races.

You may also want to run a pivot on Julian Critchlow's combined EC spreadsheet to confirm this number.

emkhowley

Thanks, @evmo Super helpful as usual!
(And yes, that was a typo--meant 218)