Sports
Brandis Takes the Leap: Chicago River Swim Weekend Kicks Off With a Big Jump
Dozens of people made a splash in the Chicago River Friday morning — including WTTW News’ very own Brandis Friedman, anchor of “Chicago Tonight.”
It was all part of an event called the Big Jump, a new addition to this year’s open water Chicago River Swim. The jump is a way to take part in the river swim celebration without having to go the one- or two-mile distance of the main event.
Unless an invited guest, the registration fee was $500.
One of the goals of the event was to help fundraise for youth swim education, said Chicago River Swim founder Doug McConnell.
“Swimming is a life-saving skill and so many Chicago children don’t have it, and so we’ve been able to help out about 4,000 kids through those lessons and we’re hoping to accelerate that,” McConnell said.
Proceeds from both the jump and swim events also support ALS research.
Hande Özdinler, an associate professor of neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine who conducts ALS research, said she thinks Friday’s jump will help raise awareness of the fatal disease.
“Because jumping in the water, it just shakes you,” Özdinler said. “It just brings you in a different dimension and I think that’s what we need, to just shake up and realize that ALS is a curable disease, and that the solution will be found right here in Chicago.”
Everyday folks took the plunge alongside Olympians, elected officials, civic leaders and celebrities, like former Chicago Bears cornerback Charles “Peanut” Tillman.
Tillman said he took part in honor of former running back Chris Johnson, or CJ2K, who publicly revealed his ALS diagnosis in June.
“He was invincible and for him to get that and to see how quickly it affected him, I think it hurt a lot of guys,” Tillman said.
The event also acknowledges all the restoration work that’s flowed into the Chicago River, with help from organizations like the nonprofit Friends of the Chicago River.
“Cleaning up the Chicago River system is the work of decades,” said Friends of the Chicago River Executive Director Margaret Frisbie.
“The Water Reclamation District, Friends of the Chicago River, Environmental Law and Policy Center, Sierra Club, all of us (are) working together to make the river, the water, clean, the river accessible, building places, and so we have the tunnel and reservoir plan where we’re treating our sewage effluent that discharges into the river so that ambient water quality supports swimming and it’s safe for people,” Frisbie said.
Chicago River Swim organizers said they take the river’s water quality very seriously. University of Illinois Chicago researchers were on hand to test the water and make sure it was safe for swimmers.
“We are looking for something called fecal indicator bacteria,” said UIC School of Public Health’s Abhilasha Shrestha, whose team collected samples Friday morning ahead of the event. “So we’re looking for the concentration, and U.S. EPA has a threshold for recreational water quality monitoring.”
“The results are good,” she continued. “They are well below the 1,000 limit that the U.S. EPA has.”
The Chicago River Swim’s main event is set to take place Sunday.
