At the first “Swimming Badge Day”, children and adults in more than 30 Bavarian municipalities had their water skills tested. With the day of action, the DLRG and the state swimming associations in Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, Hesse and Rhineland-Palatinate wanted to promote safe swimming because many children are no longer able to do it well enough.
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In a Nuremberg outdoor pool, Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU) handed out their “seahorses” to around ten children after they had passed the challenge. Although he hadn’t changed his clothes for swimming himself, he took off his shoes and rolled up his pant legs.
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Officially called “early swimmers”, according to the DLRG, the seahorse badge does not mean that you can swim safely. The children only have to swim 25 meters, dive for a ring and know the bathing rules. So the Nuremberg children were asked if they were allowed to push others into the water – the expected answer was “no”.
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The DLRG assumes that around 60 percent of all children cannot swim safely after primary school, with an increasing tendency due to canceled swimming courses during the corona pandemic.
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