Triple Olympic Champion Tom Dean will join five other British swimmers to break the English Channel Relay World Record and raise money for water safety education in partnership with Royal Life Saving Society UK (RLSSUK).
Dean will join Dan Jervis, Hector Pardoe, Tobias Robinson, George Taplin, and Josh Gammon in the hopes of swimming the 33-kilometer-long English Channel in under 6 hours and 52 minutes, which is the World Record for a relay set by the US national team in 1990. This record has gone unbroken for 36 years.
Each athlete will swim for roughly one hour as they attempt to cross the body of water, swimming through tidal currents of up to 12 knots (about 13.8 miles per hour). The swim will take place later this month, beginning on the Kent Coast of England and finishing in France.
Dean, a celebrity ambassador for the RLSSUK, shared a post on Instagram about the challenge ahead of them, saying it was “about time that [the record] gets brought back to British hands”.
He adds that the six-man team will be led under the mentorship of Andy Donaldson, who was the first person to complete the Oceans Seven marathon swimming challenge in a single year.
