London-based IT Engineer Bids to be First Person to Swim from New York to London

LONDON, Dec. 21, 2015 /PRNewswire/ — London IT engineer and extreme swimmer Michael Ventre is hoping to raise millions for Oxfam by swimming 3,800 miles from New York to London – a feat which has never been attempted before. Ventre hopes his swim will raise millions for Oxfam, a London-based charity that fights poverty and hunger around the world.

Ventre successfully swam the English Channel in 2011 and plans to make his world-record attempt at swimming the Atlantic in April 2017. The unprecedented open water challenge will take him between five and eight months and will present an incredible test of resilience as he navigates everything from killer whales to hurricanes. Michael will swim alongside a support vessel where he will rest in the evenings. A GPS reading will be taken each time he leaves the water where he will pick back up the next morning.

Starting in the Hudson River in New York and ending in the Thames in central London, Michael Ventre’s challenge is equivalent to swimming the length of Great Britain almost four-and-a-half times.

As well as swimming the English Channel, Michael, who is aged 38, has completed two other ‘Oceans Seven’ extreme swims – the Molokai Channel in Hawaii and the Catalina Channel in Los Angeles. He also swam from Robben Island to Blouberg in Cape Town in 2013 in freezing shark-infested waters and has become an accomplished ice swimmer, participating in the Winter World Championships in Latvia and Finland.

To help him tackle this huge feat, Ventre is looking for funding via brand sponsorship, crowdfunding and donations. Interested donors and sponsors can get in touch with him on his crowdfunding website here:

Michael has been dreaming of swimming seemingly impossible distances since the age of ten when he watched England’s Thomas Gregory becoming the youngest person to swim the English Channel on TV in 1988. Born to British parents in landlocked Botswana, it would be another three years before Michael even saw the ocean, but from that day on he was determined to swim the English Channel – the first of many extreme swims.