Fact. Austria is a landlocked country. The nearest thing they have that in anyway resembles an ocean is an intricate system of meandering mountain streams that dissect this lush, mountainous and dry, European country.

Austria. Not famous for swimmers and not designed for swimming.

Question. If you have no beaches, no coastline and, well, see above, why learn to swim? The great swimming nations of the Earth? Australia, Great Britain, The United States of America, France. Island nations or countries which have so much water that if you want to escape the place, you have to swim. And swim well. It is why there are no great swimmers from Luxembourg, Mali, Malawi, Paraguay, Nepal, Niger or Switzerland. There is no history of and there has never been any need to learn how to goddamn swim. If you wanted to get out of Tajikistan 50,000 years ago then you walked. So it comes of somewhat of a surprise that Austria not only has an Olympic swimming team but that it is also operational and, one supposes, setting its sights on London and the Summer Olympics of 2012.

before swimming hats, psychotic glares were the order of the day.

What isn’t surprising is that ineptitude is rife. And this time funny. 19 year old Jakub Marly, Olympic hopeful and member of the Austrian Olympic swimming team can dig. He can dig like a JCB on growth hormones. This is known because on Monday during a training and holiday trip to Florida (We at Take The Blame assume this is because, Oh, you know, they don’t have any water in Austria) he dug a 2-metre square hold on the beach. Why? Who fucking knows why. To show off his digging skills? If, as expected the Austrian team don’t upstage the pool in London, maybe he was auditioning for a career in excavation.

So, he spent hours and hours digging until he had a hole Stephen Hawking would have been proud of. Then jumped in it. The whole thing collapsed, burying poor Jakub Marly – Shit, It’s all fun and games until someone buries themselves in sand on a beach in Florida. The alarm was raised by other members of the swimming team and soon a team of 70 firefighters were on the scene to dig the helpless swimmer out. Also on the scene were a few hundred spectators. Probably the largest crowd the Austrian swimming team has ever encountered.

Being serious, Jakub Marly had a narrow escape. His ineptitude nearly cost him more than a little embarrassment. It nearly cost him his life. Next time you go to the beach, don’t dig a hole deep enough to bury a giraffe and then jump in it.

The Austrian Swimming team is heading back to land locked Austria where the hills, not the lakes and rivers and seas, are alive to the sound of music.