Swimming with the current
In a river the current is half the race. At Chester's Dee Mile you swim a mile and a quarter entirely with the current, and depending on how much water the Dee is carrying, winning times have ranged from 19'48" to 33'25". In Dresden the Elbe flows at an average of 1.1 m/s: anyone swimming down the Elbeschwimmen feels it from the first metre.
That is why river races take different forms from lake or sea races. The most common is the downstream swim, from a point upstream to one downstream: the Thames Marathon, 13 km from Henley to Marlow with feed stations at the locks, Swim the Suck in the Tennessee River gorge, the UltraEbre. There is the out-and-back, which means swimming against the current too: at Pittsburgh's Three Rivers Marathon Swim you swim 5 km with the current and 5 against it in each of the city's three rivers, the Ohio, the Monongahela and the Allegheny, for 30 km. And there is the crossing from one bank to the other, as in Wuhan on the Yangtze.
Near its mouth a river becomes an estuary and the tide takes over. On the Hudson, which is an estuary as far as Troy, 8 Bridges starts each stage on the ebb tide; on the Tay, in Dundee, the YeAABA club, founded in 1884, swims its championship races without wetsuits, and the Kirkton of Balmerino runs 8 miles with the tide to Broughty Ferry.
Marathons on the great rivers
The Santa Fe–Coronda was first swum on January 22, 1961, under the name Maratón Náutica del Litoral Argentino: eight people started and Carlos Larriera won in eight hours. The course descends the Río Santa Fe to Cuatro Bocas and then the Río Coronda, within the Paraná system, for approximately 57 km; the distance changes with the route, and in 2026 the local press counted 59.5 km. That year, Italian swimmer Alessio Occhipinti won in 8h42'59". For non-professionals, there is a 48 km version from the Costanera Este of Santa Fe to the Coronda balneario, which is swum on different dates without a ranking.
In the United States, the 8 Bridges descends the Hudson in seven stages over seven days, 120 miles from the Rip Van Winkle Bridge to the Verrazzano-Narrows: each stage starts at one bridge and ends at the next. In Russia, the Samara 181 rounds the bend of the Volga under the Zhiguli Mountains in five stages, ranging from 10.5 to 42 km, swum solo, in pairs, or as a relay.
In Europe, three river marathons run in the same series, the Marathon River Swim Series: Le Flow des Gabarriers, 33 km of the Charente from Châteauneuf to Cognac; the UltraEbre, 31 km of the Ebro, established in 2012, swum solo or in pairs with a support kayak; and the GlommaDyppen in Norway, where the water temperature in the Glomma can drop from 17-18 °C (63-64 °F) to about 10 °C (50 °F) in just a few days.
A century of races in the city
In Dublin the Liffey Swim has been held since 1920. The historic course ran from Victoria Quay to Butt Bridge, a mile and a half through the city centre, and in 1923 Jack B. Yeats made a painting of it, “The Liffey Swim”, which the following year won the silver medal in the art competition of the Paris Olympics. In Chester the Dee Mile dates from 1922: its first champion, Vic Beaman, went on to captain the British water polo team at the 1928 Amsterdam Games. Women have been admitted since 1969, and to hold the champion's title you must live within five miles of the Chester Cross.
In Wuhan swimmers have raced across the Yangtze since 1934, when 44 started over 5 km; today the distance is 1.8 km. On 16 July 1966 Mao Zedong, aged 73, entered the river at the head of about 5,000 swimmers: the party press claimed an impossible speed, and the swim remained a political act more than a sporting one.
In Zurich the Limmatschwimmen was started in 1945 by two members of the Schwimmclub Zürileu. It has stopped and restarted several times, most recently from 1978 to 1985, and today it takes 4,500 people 2 km down the Limmat, from the Frauenbad to the Letten river baths: on 15 August 2026 the sixtieth edition was swum. In Sweden the Vansbrosimningen began in 1950, when two residents of Vansbro decided to swim under all six of the town's bridges: ten started, nine finished. Since 1971 it has been part of En Svensk Klassiker.
Cities return to their rivers
In Paris bathing in the Seine had been banned since 1923. On 5 July 2025, after a clean-up costing about 1.4 billion euros, three bathing sites opened, one at the Bras de Grenelle near the Eiffel Tower; as a rule they close the day after rain, because the sewers overflow into the river. In August 2026 the open water events of the European Championships were swum at the Bras de Grenelle, and the same stretch, between the Bir-Hakeim and Rouelle bridges, hosts the EDF Aqua Challenge. The Paris Open Swim crosses the city over 8.5 km, between the Seine and the Canal de l'Ourcq.
In Chicago, on 21 September 2025, 263 people swam in the Chicago River: it was the first organised swim in the river in almost a century, and the water had been tested nine times in the nineteen days before. The 2026 edition was cancelled on the morning itself because of river conditions. In Berlin an association is working to make the 1.8 km of the Spreekanal around Museum Island fit for bathing.
Not all city river swims are races. In Germany, on the Rhine in Cologne and the Elbe in Dresden, people swim together, without a ranking: the Rheinschwimmen is a club swim for members and guests, the Elbeschwimmen is free and requires no registration. King of the Thames, from Hampton Court to Kingston, is also explicitly non-competitive.
Floods, rain and cold water
A river changes from one day to the next, and races allow for it. In 2005 the Limmatschwimmen was cancelled for the first time: the Limmat was carrying 295 m³ of water per second. Swim the Suck depends on how much water is released by the Chickamauga Dam upstream: over the years it has been swum with a flow between zero and 33,000 cubic feet per second, and the 2024 edition was called off because of flooding.
In our calendar the river season is summer: most races fall between June and September, peaking in August. In the southern hemisphere the swimming runs from November to February, on the Paraná and in Australia. And then there is winter: the Donauschwimmen in Neuburg goes down the Danube for about 4 km on the last Saturday of January. It began with eight swimmers in 1970; in 2010 the water was at 2.1 °C (36 °F) and almost 1,700 people went in.
