Glued to Twitter and your television with a bad case of Olympic fever? A 34-year-old London man took his mania a step further: he attempted to swim from France to New York.
While on a beach vacation, the unnamed man told friends “that he was off to New York to carry the Olympic spirit across the Atlantic,” reports the Daily Mail. Assuming he was joking, the friends watched him swim off.
Lifeguards saw him swim out of view past the buoys that mark the swimming area and called out a helicopter. A diver was dispatched to advise the man to turn around rather than continue his 3,594-mile journey. He wasn’t convinced until lifeguards joined the diver and threw him a line.
He made it about a quarter-mile, or four laps of an Olympic-sized pool.
“It’s a bit of a crazy story,” police officer Laurent Saintespes who is based at the Biarritz airport, told the Agence France Presse (AFP). “You have to have a sense of humor when the Olympics are on in London.”
Image: French lifeguards practicing a rescue in 2006. Their skills came to good use when persuading a swimmer that it probably wasn’t such a great idea to swim from France to the U.S. to “carry the Olympic spirit across the Atlantic.”
