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Ultra-swimmer inspired by Thor actor Chris Hemsworth to take on Iceland swim

Ultra-swimmer inspired by Thor actor Chris Hemsworth to take on Iceland swim

ITV News15-05-2025

An ultra-swimmer has said he was inspired by actor Chris Hemsworth 's role as Nordic God Thor to take on a mammoth swim around Iceland.
Ross Edgley joked the challenge will be 'the closest thing yet to swimming around Asgard' – the home of Thor – as he plans to swim 1,000 miles around the whole of Iceland in a challenge expected to take three months.
The 39-year-old, from Cheshire, said the idea for his challenge was inspired by Marvel's Thor star Hemsworth, who introduced him to Nordic folklore after they met during the production of Thor: Love And Thunder.
'I was always just full of questions, just saying, 'why are you doing that? Why does Thor do this?' and we just got chatting,' the ultra-swimmer said.
'His (Hemsworth) knowledge of Nordic folklore is amazing. He's like an encyclopaedia of it. We got chatting about that and then he sort of explained (the folklore) to me.'
'I just thought Iceland, which inspired Tolkien and various other Nordic folklore, is the closest thing yet to swimming around Asgard.'
The athlete will begin his journey, named the Great Icelandic Swim, on Friday, where he is expected to face choppy waves, killer whales and temperatures as low as 3C.
His swimming pattern will consist of swimming for six hours and resting for six hours, which will be repeated every day for around three months.
Mr Edgley is no stranger to difficult challenges after he swam more than 1,791 miles in 157 days around the coast of Great Britain and earned a Guinness World Record for the longest distance assisted adventure swim after covering 317 miles along the Yukon River in Canada.
He said the Iceland challenge is likely to be 'twice as hard' despite it being almost 'half the distance of the Great Britain swim' because of the colder temperatures.
'Usually in England, when you get out of a frozen lake, you're running somewhere where there's a hot chocolate and you can get around the fire, but out there it's just Viking countries,' he said.
'The wind chill is a different sort of cold and that was a wake-up call for me.'
The 39-year-old said he is aiming to get 'as fat as possible and as fit as possible' in order to combat the cold temperatures.
'Body fat is insulating, so the more of it you have the more insulated you are… you just kind of want to be almost seal-like,' he explained.
The swim is also being completed in the name of science as he has teamed up with the University of Iceland and the Marine and Freshwater Research Institute of Iceland to take daily water samples.
The samples are designed to help build a picture about the biodiversity around Iceland's coast and help towards researching the environmental DNA (eDNA) in the water.
'It allows us to take an incredible picture of the biodiversity all around Iceland,' Mr Edgley said.
'It would allow us to take eDNA samples all around the coast, so we would be able to map the biodiversity of Iceland in a level of detail that's never been seen before.'
He hopes the public will follow and support his Great Icelandic Swim as he shares updates via social media.
While he acknowledged his followers may tune in to 'see my tongue fall off because of the salt water', he also hopes the challenge will educate people about Iceland's biodiversity.
'Come along, see my tongue fall off, see killer whales and seals… but ultimately, it'll be brilliant to communicate the science as well,' he said.

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Scottish Sun

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  • Scottish Sun

Ed Sheeran reveals secret boozy night out with major sports star as he lifts lid on his huge celeb pals

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Ed Sheeran reveals secret boozy night out with major sports star as he lifts lid on his huge celeb pals
Ed Sheeran reveals secret boozy night out with major sports star as he lifts lid on his huge celeb pals

The Sun

time26 minutes ago

  • The Sun

Ed Sheeran reveals secret boozy night out with major sports star as he lifts lid on his huge celeb pals

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Delivering possibly the most fun gig i've ever been to, his Party After Dark Tour is a nostalgic trip down memory lane with feel good banger after banger after banger. Everyone there simply wants to have a good time - with the tube to the venue packed with fans in costumes all singing at the top of their lungs. Chancing my luck, I opted to dress as Mr Worldwide himself... and safe to say it went down a treat backstage. After a flurry of possibly the hottest female dancers I've ever seen, Pitbull appeared out of his dressing room - catching my outfit and grinning from ear to ear. "Man I love it" he laughed before giving me a big hug. I quickly launched into a short tale of how I'd ran to Soho that afternoon to buy my baldcap - bumping into three other music lovers doing exactly the same thing. Smiling Pitbull said: "Well next time you see them you make sure you tell them from me thank you. I love all my Bald E's. "We are going to have a great show tonight. I can feel it. "For the first time tonight my band are going to dress as Bald E's too." He added on stage: "I tell you why I call you guys [fans] the bald E's. Because we fly high, and we soar high like bald eagles. So therefore we are the bald E's "And everywhere we go, and anytime you're there, you put on that bald cap and you already know you are going to have the time of your life. In fact new date from QR Code Generator have revealed searches for 'bald cap' have it an all time high in the UK amid Pitbull's tour. It's hard to quite put into words the energy in the O2 - 90% of the sold out 20,000 venue has come dressed as the star. Sure concerts like Taylor Swift have an amazing atmosphere and everyone dresses up but vibe at Pitbull is... different. No one cares about looking sexy or Instagram-ready as they are wearing a rubber bald cap and shirt. They are simply there to have a good time - and boy does he pull it off. You don't need therapy. You just need two hours at a Pitbull gig. 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Speaking to hosts Annie MacManus and Nick Grimshaw, she said: 'I've been working on Patchwork for a long time. I tell you what, pretty much since I saw you this time last year I've been working on Patchwork.' Asked if that meant they took 'a lot of persuading', she added: 'Well, it's more logistical.' Foo Fighters did a set under the name The Churnups in 2023, and this sounds just as exciting. MILEY END TO FAMILY QUARREL 17 MILEY CYRUS has revealed she was the one to end the family feud following her parents' divorce. On the Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky podcast yesterday, she explained: 'My family and I have had a really difficult, dark decade. 'Half of us weren't speaking to each other at one point. And we cleaned all that up. That was a really important part of my year.' She added: 'I watched what happens when you don't clean things up as they're happening.' Asked if they'd had therapy, Miley said: 'We're so messy. We didn't even do any of that. 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MUSE, the best live band I've ever seen in my life, have stepped in at the last minute to replace Kings of Leon as top of the bill for Madrid's Mad Cool Festival. The American rockers were forced to pull out after singer Caleb Followill injured his foot. But British act Muse will headline the opening night on July 10 instead. MICK HUCKNALL will be awarded ASCAP's Golden Note Award as he celebrates Simply Red's 40th anniversary. He will be handed the honour – recognising extraordinary career milestones – at an American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers ceremony in London on June 17. London singer and songwriter Lola Young will pick up the ASCAP Vanguard Award. Mick, you're my hero.

Film Reviews: How to Train Your Dragon  Ballerina
Film Reviews: How to Train Your Dragon  Ballerina

Scotsman

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  • Scotsman

Film Reviews: How to Train Your Dragon Ballerina

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We don't yet know why, but as the film's puzzle-box structure starts to fall into place details gradually emerge: some stolen gold has gone missing during the performance of a samurai-themed touring puppet show that the woman, who goes by the name of Tornado, performs with her father Fujin, a taciturn traditionalist who wants his resistant daughter to retain a connection to their homeland (Tornado is played by rising Japanese star Kōki; Fujin by Shōgun star Takehiro Hira). Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Sign up to our FREE Arts & Culture newsletter at Their familial tension finds a harsher parallel in the relationship between Sugarman and Little Sugar, who resents his father's insistence on giving every member of the gang an equal share of the loot he apparently did the most to procure. When the two groups' paths cross in violent fashion, these simmering generational conflicts come to the fore, but only Roth — whose character's bleeding stomach wound feels like an arch tribute to his role in Reservoir Dogs — is given enough material to imbue proceedings with any real depth. The rest of the film is so vaguely sketched there's no sense of who these characters are or what this world is. Consequently, when it eventually turns into a bloody revenge movie, the action feels frustratingly stilted and repetitive, the title character never quite becoming the force of nature her name implies. Ana de Armas as Eve in Ballerina | Courtesy of Lionsgate There's much more pulpy fun to be had in Ballerina, an entertainingly ludicrous spin-off from the John Wick franchise in which Ana De Armas makes good on the action star potential glimpsed in No Time To Die to play an orphan raised in a ballet school that doubles as a front for an elite assassin training facility. 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