Nigel Si­mon

Top T&T swim­mer George Bovell III will splash off his 2013 sea­son when he com­petes at the Bolles High School-host­ed Jax50 at the Bolles School Vi­ble Pool, San Jose Boule­vard, Jack­sonville, Flori­da to­day.

The Jax50 is an event to cel­e­brate the sport of swim­ming and to cre­ate more aware­ness about the sport and has two goals: First­ly, to help raise funds for The Plan­et Swim Foun­da­tion in or­der to teach un­der­priv­i­leged chil­dren how to be wa­ter safe and learn how to swim. Sec­ond­ly, to help pro­fes­sion­al/post grad swim­mers to keep work­ing to­wards their goal of ex­cel­lence in the sport that they have in­vest­ed a lot of time, pas­sion and mon­ey.

Yes­ter­day saw the of­fi­cial start of the three-day event, but to­day, Bovell III, who holds the joint record of 19.16 sec­onds with Auburn Uni­ver­si­ty's Adam Brown, and a host of oth­er top pro­fes­sion­al swim­mers will com­pete in the Dual Chal­lenge fol­lowed by the clin­ic with the pro­fes­sion­als for the swim­mers/coach­es to­mor­row.

In to­day's event, Bovell will do bat­tle with Amer­i­can 2008 Olympic gold medal­list Cullen Jones and 2012 gold and sil­ver Olympic Games medal win­ner Ricky Berens as well as Josh Schnei­der, a 2010 FI­NA Short Course World Cham­pi­onship 50m freestyle bronze win­ner.

While he did not com­pete at the JAX50 last year due to his prepa­ra­tions for the Lon­don Olympic Games, Bovell III had by far his most pro­duc­tive sea­son as an in­ter­na­tion­al swim­mer when he cap­tured 16 medals (sev­en gold and nine sil­ver) on the eight-stop FI­NA/Are­na Swim­ming World Cham­pi­onships Cir­cuit to placed sec­ond over­all in the es­teemed in­ter­na­tion­al com­pe­ti­tion points ta­ble.

He was al­so sev­enth in the men's 50m freestyle fi­nal at the Lon­don Olympics, and im­proved to fourth in the De­cem­ber 14, 2012 event fi­nal in the 11th FI­NA World Short Course Cham­pi­onships in Is­tan­bul, Turkey, be­fore he earned a first ever medal–a bronze in the 100 me­tres in­di­vid­ual med­ley–four days lat­er to be­come the first T&T world cham­pi­onship swim medal­list, adding to his Athens Olympics 200m IM bronze.

On his re­turn home in De­cem­ber, Bovell III, a four-time and for­mer NCAA swim cham­pi­on as a mem­ber of Auburn Uni­ver­si­ty, de­scribed 2012 as his best year ever in the sport, not just based on his stel­lar per­for­mances in the pool.

The 29-year-old Bovell III, speak­ing on his re­turn home on Christ­mas Eve, re­flect­ed on all his achieve­ments which came fol­low­ing his near fa­tal ac­ci­dent on Au­gust 10 last year when he was knocked briefly un­con­scious af­ter be­ing in­volved in an ear­ly morn­ing ve­hic­u­lar ac­ci­dent near the Man­zanil­la Sec­ondary School and was side­lined for al­most four months.

Fol­low­ing his re­cov­ery, Bovell III took the World Cup cir­cuit by storm and among his 16 medals was a new na­tion­al record in the 50m freestyle (20.82 in Stock­holm, Swe­den) on Oc­to­ber 14 and in the 100m IM (51.20) in Berlin, Ger­many, six days lat­er.