Peter Van Dijk

It is with great honor O*H*I*O Masters Swim Club posthumously bestows the 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award to Peter Van Dijk.

Peter began swimming with USMS in the early 1970’s and soon was having spectacular swims. Over his swimming career, he had 243 Individual Top 10 swims, ranking Number One 27 times! 109 of the 243 swims were in the top 3 swims for each season. An additional 50 relays finished in the Top 10, with 15 of those finishing at the top of the list. He won 50 National Championships. In 2014, he won his 17th individual FINA title at the Montreal Masters World Championships bringing home four gold medals at age 85.

Peter’s All American swims spanned from 1972 to 2014, mostly in the freestyle and the backstroke. He broke international records well into his 70s and 80s, demonstrating a passion for fitness and a zest for life that impressed everyone who knew him.

In 2015, Peter was inducted into the Greater Cleveland Sports Hall of Fame.
Peter swam several relays at US Masters Swimming LCM Nationals held at the Spire Institute in 2015. He was still up for helping the team on relays, even going off of the blocks for his leg of the relay, at age 86!

Fortunately for swimmers in greater Cleveland, Peter’s career was in architecture. He combined his professional expertise with his love for speed the pool and designed one of the fastest pools in the country at Cleveland State University (now known as Busbey Natatorium), thanks to Peter’s design which included some of the largest gutters ever installed in a pool, extreme depth and overhead lighting. The design earned him national acclaim and helped many of us earn best times!

Among his other professional credits are his nationally recognized innovative design for Blossom, the open-air pavilion which is now the summer home of the Cleveland Orchestra, and his development of a master plan for Playhouse Square which showed how its separate theater lobbies could be internally connected, creating what has become the second-largest unified performing arts center in the United States, after Lincoln Center in New York. His designs are also evident at Cain Park, John Carroll University and Ursuline College.

Sadly, Peter passed away in 2019 at the age of 90. O*H*I*O Masters Swim Club is honored to have had Mrs. Bobbie Van Dijk widow of Peter Van Dijk accept the Lifetime Achievement Award posthumously for Peter’s many contributions to the sport of swimming.