National team Iceland Strokes Freestyle Weight 74 kg Stroke Freestyle swimming | Sport Swimming Height 1.88 m Club Mission Viejo Nadadores | |
Full name Ragnheiður Ragnarsdóttir Born 24 October 1984 (age 32) ( 1984-10-24 ) Reykjavík, Iceland | ||
Ragnheiður Ragnarsdóttir (born October 24, 1984) is an Icelandic former swimmer, who specialized in sprint freestyle events. She is a multiple-time Icelandic record holder in both long and short course freestyle (both 50 and 100).
Ragnarsdóttir made her Olympic debut, as Iceland's youngest swimmer (aged 19), at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens. She qualified for two swimming events by attaining B-standard entry times of 26.34 (50 m freestyle) and 56.74 (100 m freestyle). In the 100 m freestyle, Ragnarsdóttir finished dead-last in heat three and fortieth overall with a time of 58.47 seconds. In the 50 m freestyle, Ragnarsdóttir almost snared out of triumph in heat five by a hundredth of a second (0.01) behind Luxembourg's Lara Heinz, finishing second and thirty-first overall in 26.36 seconds.
At the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, Ragnarsdóttir qualified for the second time in the same swimming program as the previous Games. She cleared FINA B-cuts of 25.95 (50 m freestyle) from the Dutch Open Swim Cup in Eindhoven and 56.06 (100 m freestyle) from FINA World Championships in Melbourne. In the 100 m freestyle, she was reassigned in heat three against seven other swimmers, including Hong Kong's Hannah Wilson and Bahamas' Arianna Vanderpool-Wallace. She touched out Cyprus' Anna Stylianou to take the fifth spot and thirty-fifth overall by three hundredths of a second (0.03), in a time of 56.35 seconds. In the 50 m freestyle, Ragnarsdóttir finished fourth in heat eight by 0.13 of a second behind Jamaica's Natasha Moodie, clocking at 25.82. Ragnarsdóttir failed to advance into the semifinals, as she placed thirty-sixth out of 92 swimmers in the evening prelims.