FORT LAUDERDALE – The International Swimming Hall of Fame (ISHOF) will recognize Julian Critchlow for his extensive contributions to the administration of open water swimming with the 2026 Irving Davids/Captain Roger W. Wheeler Memorial Award. The award will be presented to Nelson during the International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame (IMSHOF) Induction and Award Ceremony in San Diego on Saturday May 16th, 2026.
The Irving Davids/Captain Roger W. Wheeler Memorial Award is presented annually by the International Swimming Hall of Fame to the individual who has contributed the most to the administration of open water swimming.
This year’s award recognizes Julian Critchlow, an open water swimming administrator from Great Britain. Julian Critchlow compiled (and updates) the list of English Channel solo swimmers in the 2004 to ensure that there would be a single reliable source of information. This was much more than combing the lists of the two ratification organizations. He went back 150 years and identified legitimate swims such as the Butlin’s Cross Channel Races. The English Channel generates the most publicity for the sport and this database gives swimmers/writers a factual basis for tens of thousands of future stories.
The database includes swimmer’s gender, age, country, pilot, date/time, IMSHOF Induction, Triple Crown, and known physical disabiliities. He later added a database of relay swims.
It enables swimmers to know for the first time: “What number swimmer of the English Channel am I?” This database can be sorted by other factors: “How many swimmers older than me from Spain have completed the swim?”
It enables researchers to use the open source database to analyse the history and success criteria for English Channel swims – with resuls published on his blog site (https://tinyurl.com/channel-facts).
The database can be found at: https://tinyurl.com/relay-channel-database and https://tinyurl.com/solo-channel-
Julian himself is an accomplished marathon swimmer, completing the English Chnnell four times 2004, 2014, 2017 and 2019 swimming – and raised over US $200,000 for charity. He was inducted into the International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame in 2021.
For additional information, please call Ned Denison in Ireland at (+353) 87-987-1573 or ISHOF at (+1954) 462-6536, or visit http://www.ishof.org