Maarten van der Weijden
On August 21, 2008, at the Shunyi park outside Beijing, Maarten van der Weijden of the Netherlands won the first Olympic 10km marathon swim ever contested, touching in 1 hour 51 minutes 51.6 seconds after Britain's David Davies drifted off line in the finishing funnel; Davies took silver and Germany's Thomas Lurz bronze, all three within seconds of each other. In 2001, aged 20 and months after finishing ninth at the open-water world championships, van der Weijden had been diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia and given a 30 to 50 percent chance of survival. He was, he says, "the most lazy patient that you can imagine — when they sent a physiotherapist to put me on a home trainer, I pretended I was asleep." Chemotherapy and a stem-cell transplant followed. He returned to the pool in 2003, swimming a 100m in over 90 seconds, and was pleased a week later to swim it in 1:23. He retired at 27, at the top. Since then he has swum the 200km Elfstedentocht route for charity — 163km in 2018 before illness stopped him, then the full course in 74 hours and 4 minutes in June 2019 — raising more than €6.1 million for cancer research, and in 2023 he did the whole eleven-city route again as a triathlon.