3rd IPC Swimming European Championships | |
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Date(s) | 4 – 10 August |
Venue(s) | Pieter van den Hoogenband Swimming Stadium |
Nations participating | 35 |
Athletes participating | 376 |
The 2014 IPC Swimming European Championships is an international swimming competition. It was held in Eindhoven, the Netherlands and ran from 4 to 10 August. Around 375 athletes from 35 different countries attended. The venue, the Pieter van den Hoogenband Swimming Stadium, also held the 2010 IPC Swimming World Championships.
The Championship was staged at the Pieter van den Hoogenband Swimming Stadium located in the south of Eindhoven. The complex contains three outdoor swimming pools, all renovated shortly before the staging of the competition.
As with the 2013 IPC Swimming World Championships, the IPC will continue to show live streaming of the finals on ParalympicSport.TV. In the United Kingdom Channel 4 continued their commitment to parasport with their own live streaming Paralympics website with pool-side commentary and live action shown daily on their sister channel More4.
Athletes are allocated a classification for each event based upon their disability to allow fairer competition between athletes of similar ability. The classifications for swimming are:
Classifications run from S1 (severely disabled) to S10 (minimally disabled) for athletes with physical disabilities, and S11 (totally blind) to S13 (legally blind) for visually impaired athletes. Blind athletes must use blackened goggles.
Host nation (Netherlands)
Many competitors won multiple medals at the 2014 Championships. The following athletes won five gold medals or more.
Ukraine finished the first day of the championship at the top of the medals table with six golds. The first record of the day fell to Summer Mortimer who broke the European record for the women's 50m freestyle in the S10 category. This was Mortimer's first major international competition since switching to the Netherlands teams after a successful career as a Canadian swimmer. Germany's Elena Krawzow also set a new European record, set when she won the women's 100m backstroke SB13. who set a new European record for the Women's 100 metre breastroke S13. Sarai Gascón Moreno of Spain shaved a hundredth of a second off her own European record to equal South Africa's Natalie du Toit's 50m freestyle S9 world record in the last swim of the morning session.