Joeri Vansteenlant Eerste plaats in Duathlon voor Joeri Vansteenlant.     >>      Belgische athleten Belgische athleten domineren de duathlon.                         >>      Dendermonde Dendermonde swimming team @ Club La Santa                         >>      To Walk again De film van Marc Herremans door Stijn Coninx               >>      Dendermonde swimming team @ Club la Santa Almost every day in the morning and the afternoon, you can find a Belgian swimming team in the Olympic Pool: Dendermonde, named after the city they are from in Belgium, has been staying here since July 6th and they will be training at Club La Santa till July 18th! Jean-Marie Raemdonck is the 43-year-old coach of the team. He started swimming many, many years ago because he was an asthma patient. This sport is good if you have this kind of disease, so Jean-Marie was already in the water when he was very young. His first swimming club was Dendermonde, he has been member of another club in Antwerp and he quit when he was about 18 years old. "I couldn't handle it anymore. Even though I was in the top of breast-stroke, I had to stop because other things like studies claimed a lot of my time. It was a pity, but it was not the end of my sports career. In 1995, I started coaching, again in the Dendermonde team: I went back to my roots!" Sitting next to the Olympic Pool with his training schedules, Jean-Marie keeps an eye on what the swimmers are doing. They are here these weeks with 23 people in the age between 11 and 21. They're amateurs, but they get a very serious accompaniment and that seems to work out really well: there are Belgian Champions, Youth Champions and people with records among the team members! "The training schedules are quite complicated sometimes, because I make personal schemes and also schedules for a group. That's what I'm doing most, and fortunately we have another trainer now... since a while. She takes some groups as well, because it became a little bit too much for me to do everything!" Dendermonde has a total of 285 members, from young to old and all different levels. Of course not everybody trains the same amount of hours a week, but the group here at Club La Santa usually trains about 13 hours. There will be small differences between them and it depends of the physical condition and school hours for example. During their stay on Lanzarote, they have booked some lanes for 2 hours, twice a day. “In Belgium we train in a municipal 25 m pool, so this 50 m Olympic Pool is great. It's the first time we are here and I found the resort on the Internet. There's a website where you can find all the swimming pools over the whole world, and this one was on the list. A friend of mine has been here before and he has referred me. So, now we're here! It's nice that there are so many different facilities, but to be honest we almost only use the Olympic Pool. When you train 4 hours a day, it would be a little bit too much to do many other sports in between. We are in Spain, so we take our siesta!" On Thursday, the group went on a small trip to see part of the special landscapes of Lanzarote. They've seen the green lake at El Golfo, the Fire Mountains in the Timanfaya Park and also Los Hervideros, a wonderful creature of rocks splashed by the waves of the ocean. Jean-Marie tells that he likes the landscape and all the lava. “It's strange, but it definitely has its beauty!" After that they went to Puerto del Carmen, the biggest tourist venue of the island. There they enjoyed the sunny afternoon. At the moment, Dendermonde is training for the Belgian Championships, the Belgian Youth Championships and a summer criteria for the new ones in the competition. In the past, several members of the club have won prizes and they have good memories of some competitions. Jean-Marie: “To give an example, we went on a weekend to Seraing, in the French speaking part of our country. We had a competition there and having the whole group together there was fantastic. Also some competitions on high level in Luxembourg and Bonn, and of course the Belgian Championships were a nice experience." We wish the Dendermonde swimming team and Jean-Marie good luck with the upcoming competitions!