George Bovell

George Bovell ( born July 18, 1983 in Port of Spain, Trinidad ) is a swimmer from Trinidad and Tobago. He won an Olympic bronze medal for his country in 2004 and is so far the most successful Caribbean swimmers.

His swimming talent was apparently placed his birth, his father George was college swimmer and his mother, Barbara, a long-distance runner, the 1972 and 1976 competed for Barbados and Canada at the Olympic Games.

He could celebrate at the World Swimming Championships in Fukuoka in 2001, where he finished fourth on his special path 200 m medley in 2:01,50 minutes his first major international success. Two years later he was able to improve his time on this track on 2:00,06 minutes at the World Swimming Championships in Barcelona in 2003, but it was enough there for only a fifth.

In the XIV Pan American Games in Santo Domingo in 2003 then he could twice gold over 200m freestyle and 200m individual medley and win two silver medals over 100m freestyle and 100m backstroke. He gained only four of the seven medals for Trinidad and Tobago at the games, while the only two gold medals.

At the 2004 Olympics in Athens he won then as a complete surprise at a time of 1:58,80 minutes, the bronze in the 200m individual medley behind the two Americans Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte. From the silver medal separated him doing just two hundredths of a second. His medal was the first medal in swimming at the Olympics at all and the only for his country in Athens for the Caribbean. Overall, he was the ninth athlete who could win a medal at the Olympics for Trinidad and Tobago, the other medalists were successful in athletics and weightlifting.

With a time of 1:53,93 minutes he could set a new short-course world record in the 200m individual medley in East Meadow 2004 on 25 March 2004 at the NCAA Championships. This Bovell was the first swimmer from Trinidad and Tobago, which could improve a world record. The record held about 20 months until he was undercut by the Hungarian László Cseh at the Short Course European Championships in 2005 in Trieste by 47 hundredths of a second.

In the Caribbean Games 2006 in Cartagena George Bovell wore at the opening ceremony, the flag for his country. Currently Bovell studied sports at Auburn University in the United States.