Heather Brand (born 17 November 1982 in Harare) is a Zimbabwean swimmer, who specialised in freestyle and butterfly events. Brand had won a total of five medals, including three for the women's butterfly (50, 100, and 200 m) at the 2007 All-Africa Games in Algiers, Algeria. She also set five national records (both long and short course) in the same category at the FINA World Championships (2005 in Montreal, Canada, 2007 in Melbourne, Australia, and 2008 in Manchester, England).Brand qualified for the women's 100 m butterfly at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, by breaking a Zimbabwean record and clearing a FINA B-standard entry time of 1:00.61 from the All-Africa Games. She challenged seven other swimmers on the third heat, including Hong Kong's Hannah Wilson, a varsity swimmer from the California Golden Bears at UC Berkeley. She rounded out the field to last place by 0.65 of a second behind Greece's Eirini Kavarnou, with a time of 1:01.39. Brand, however, failed to advance into the semifinals, as she placed forty-second out of 49 swimmers in the preliminary heats.Brand is the former captain of the LSU swimming team and a graduate of wildlife management at the Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She is also a resident athlete of King Aquatic Club in Federal Way, Washington, where she trained with numerous world-class swimmers, including Margaret Hoelzer and Megan Jendrick of the United States (both of whom were Olympic medalists), and Svetlana Karpeeva, an individual medley specialist from Russia.
$950,000
