Franziska van Almsick (born 5 April 1978 in East Berlin, Germany) is a German swimmer. She won her first Olympic medals in 1992 at the Barcelona Olympic Games aged fourteen.
Her career begun at the SC Dynamo Berlin. She has the distinction of having the most career Olympic medals without ever winning a gold medal. Over her career, Van Almsick won ten Olympic medals, none of them gold. She ended her career at the Athens Olympic Games in 2004.
In 1993, she was named by Swimming World magazine as the Female World Swimmer of the Year. Her son Don Hugo was born on 7 January 2007.
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“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)