George Bovell

George Bovell (born July 18, 1983 in Port of Spain , Trinidad ) is a swimmer from Trinidad and Tobago . He won an Olympic bronze medal for his country in 2004, making him the most successful Caribbean swimming athlete to this day .

Apparently he was born with a talent for swimming, his father George was a college swimmer and his mother Barbara a long-distance runner who competed in the 1972 and 1976 Olympic Games for Barbados and Canada . His brother Nick Bovell took part as a swimmer in the 2008 Olympic Games .

His first major international success George Bovell was at the FINA World Championships in 2001 in Fukuoka celebrate, where he his special track 200 m layers in 2: 01.50 minutes to fourth place. Two years later at the 2003 World Swimming Championships in Barcelona he was able to improve his time over this distance to 2: 00.06 minutes, but it was only enough for fifth place there.

At the Pan American Games in 2003 in Santo Domingo , he was able to win gold twice in the 200 m freestyle and 200 m medley as well as twice silver in the 100 m freestyle and 100 m back . He won four of the seven medals for Trinidad and Tobago at the Games and the only two gold medals.

At the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens , he took the bronze medal in the 200 m individual medal behind the two Americans Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte with a time of 1: 58.80 minutes . Just two hundredths of a second separated him from the silver medal. His medal was the first ever Olympic swimming medal for the Caribbean and the only one for his country in Athens. Overall, he was the ninth athlete who could win a medal for Trinidad and Tobago at the Olympic Games, the other medalists were successful in athletics and weightlifting .

With a time of 1: 53.93 minutes, he was able to set a new short course world record over 200 m medley on March 25, 2004 at the 2004 NCAA championships in East Meadow . This made Bovell the first swimmer from Trinidad and Tobago to break a world record. The record lasted about 20 months until it was beaten by the Hungarian László Cseh at the European Short Course Championships in Trieste by 47 hundredths of a second.

At the 2006 Caribbean Games in Cartagena , George Bovell carried the flag for his country at the opening ceremony. Bovell is currently studying sport at Auburn University in the USA .

Web links

• George Bovell in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )
• George Bovell's athlete profile at the Auburn Tigers