Dr Rebecca Olive is Vice Chancellors Senior Research Fellow at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Her research explores how every-day, recreational sport and leisure activities are experienced through cultural politics, ecological encounters, social media production and consumption, and much more. Her Fellowship at RMIT University involves research into recreational sport and leisure in urban bodies of water - oceans, estuaries, rivers, and outdoor pools – in short, urban swimming. She has three foci - public safety, climate resilience, and urban regeneration. She has produced a StoryMap, Swim Melbourne, which maps places to swim across the city, sharing stories of risk, safety, and community. In this podcast we discuss all of these things, and more.

Murder doesn’t often feature in swimming. In this podcast, two places are linked through this theme: Ballarat and St George’s Lake, in Australia, with Wallingford and the River Thames in Oxfordshire, in the UK. Both places have factual andfictional claims to being ‘murder central’ in their respective countries. Both have good swimming, and both have murder mysteries attached to their locale. In addition, Ballarat has seen several real-life, gruesome murders in recent years. It shouldn’t put you off swimming in its nearby lakes though.

Swimming is in the DNA in Australia. Even in inland places, lakes, human-made and natural, form ideal swimming places. Human-made lakes include dammed waterways for reservoirs and goldmining works in mid- to late-nineteenth century Victoria, during the period that Australians moved toward self-determination as a country. I explore these lakes and the ideas that came with them, in and around Ballarat, Victoria, with resident Lyn Wilks.

Before the pandemic, some friends in Metz, a mid-sized city in France, near Strasbourg, were looking for somewhere to swim outdoors. The Moselle River flows through Metz, on its way to the North German wine country, before joining with the Rhine at Koblenz. This seemed the right place to make a new swimming place, in the Moselle River in and around Metz. Sibylle van der Walt was one of this group of friends. From this desire to swim in the local river, which was often contaminated in the ways that so many rivers in the Global North are, came a group, Metz Ville d’Eau, Metz City of Water. Sibylle was central to this group, with the intention of making the Moselle at Metz much more regularly swimmable. Metz Ville d’Eau continues, going from strength to strength. Since then. Metz Ville d’Eau has joined hands with other environmental groups, city councils and water-focussed agencies in the Swimmable Cities Alliance, where organizations across the world coordinate activities for making cleaner and accessible urban waterways more available to citizens who swim, and for blue spaces more generally. Sibylle van der Walt is central to the development and growth of the Swimmable Cities Alliance, which had its first Summit in Rotterdam in June 2025. In this podcast we discuss how Metz Ville d’Eau has been fashioned as a model campaign for urban river swimming.

Dr Romy Martinez is a Paraguayan singer, researcher, and ethnomusicologist, with two award-winning albums with the Purahéi Trio, including Songs by the Riverbanks, inspired by river landscapes and cultural exchange between Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil. She received the 2025 Latin GRAMMY Cultural Foundation Research Grant for Guaranía in Translation, promoting Paraguayan music in Europe. She is the first Paraguayan woman in ethnomusicology, and is a postdoctoral researcher in cultural diplomacy at Leiden University College, Netherlands. She is passionate about swimming. In this podcast we discuss how her music and research flow together, and how swimming shapes everything she does.

Laura Reineke is triple crown swimmer from Henley, UK, completing the Santa Catalina channel swim, the English Channel and the 20 Bridges swim of Manhattan Island. Locally, she is a Henley Mermaid, a group that swims for socialjustice, and founder of Friends of the Thames. She is Sue Ryder Woman of Achievement 2016. In this podcast I am with her in Henley, Oxfordshire, to discuss her swimming achievements, Henley Mermaids and her campaigning work for a clean River Thames.

Simon Griffiths is the author of Swim Wild and Free: A PracticalGuide to Swimming Outdoors 365 Days a Year, and founder of Outdoor Swimmer magazine. He is a life-long swimmer, swims year-round in the Thames and regularly takes part in open water and pool races. His swimming adventures havetaken him around the world. He was part of the team that created the STA Open Water Swimming Coaching qualification. In this podcast we discuss his latestbook, as well as his magazine, how to become a better all-round swimmer, and swimming at Teddington, London.

Toby Robinson is an international swimmer, representing England at the 2022 Commonwealth Games, and Great Britain at the Paris Olympic Games 2024. He is passionate about swimming, especially in open water. He is a staunch advocate and campaigner for clean open water in the UK, especially the River Thames in London. In September 2025, he was a key participant in a Thames relay swim from the source to London, highlighting sewage pollution in UK waterways. He is an ambassador for "Friends of the Thames", which promotes the restoration and protection of the river. In late 2025 he swam in the revived historic Lords and Commons race in the Thames in London. He discusses all of these things in this podcast.

Swimmingpod celebrates its 5th birthday, with guests Helen Edwards, Tom Kearney, Anette Frisch, Charlotte Sawyer, Tess Bird, Vera Prokopieva, and Carl Tysom. 65 episodes, covering styles and cultures of swimming in the outdoors and open water. Swimming heroes and everyday swimmers, politics and ecology of open watee. Swimming in health, disease and disability. Water and poetry, prose, music, visual arts and film. Swimming events, challenges, clubs, and groups. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since the first episode in 2020.

Sian Richardson is founder of the Bluetits Chill Swimmers, a social enterprise that has gone global. In this episode of Swimmingpod, Sian talks about how she got into winter swimming events and about Bluetits in Tallinn and at Lake Bled.