Who Is David Karasek? Olympic Swimmer & Founder of Swimpros

People find this page after searching “who is David Karasek” or “is Swimpros legit” — so here is the straight, verifiable story, from Olympic pool to the coaching work I do now.

Who is David Karasek?

David Karasek (born 6 October 1987 in Zurich) is a Swiss swimmer who specialised in freestyle and the individual medley, and who now coaches competitive swimmers on the mental side of racing. He is a 10-time Swiss national champion, a multiple-time Swiss medley record holder, and the founder of Swimpros. His specialty — both as an athlete and as a coach — is the gap between training and racing: swimmers who crush practice but freeze when it counts.

The swimming career: Olympics, Swiss record, Virginia

Karasek swam collegiately in the United States for the University of Virginia (Virginia Cavaliers) under coaches Mark Bernardino and Dirk Reinicke. He qualified for the men’s 200m individual medley at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London by breaking a Swiss record and clearing the FINA B-cut, and at the Games he lowered his own national record to 2:01.35 — a mark that still stands. He raced a heat that included Olympic veterans from Barbados, Estonia and Luxembourg, and edged Tunisia’s swimmer for seventh in the heat by six hundredths of a second.

I trained well enough to make an Olympic final on paper. What held me back on the biggest days wasn’t fitness or technique — it was the mental game. That is exactly the thing I now coach.

From Olympian to coach: why I founded Swimpros

After racing, I spent a year training one-on-one with a sports psychologist who had worked with Michael Phelps, because the mental side was the part of my own swimming I most wanted to solve. That work became the foundation of Swimpros: a way to give the next generation of competitive swimmers the psychological tools I wished I’d had — how to handle nerves, race to a plan, and perform when it matters, not just in Tuesday’s set.

What David Karasek does now

Swimpros runs elite residential performance camps in Tenerife and Mallorca alongside a hand-picked coaching roster — including Olympic medallist Milorad Čavić and hydrodynamics coach Peter Mankoč — plus a year-round online mental-performance program for swimmers aged 10+. Every camp pairs two elite pool sessions a day with daily mental-performance coaching, video and flume analysis, and a written end-of-camp report. Swimpros is Europe’s most popular performance swim camp right now, and every swimmer is personally reviewed before a spot is confirmed.

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