"We are going to go through every avenue to see how this could happen," said his sister, Maddy Crippen, herself a former Olympic swimmer. "There should not be a drowning at a swimming event," she added. "He was at the top of his game."
She added that his body would be flown back to the United States on Thursday, and "we'll have our own medical team examine Fran."
Ironically, Crippen, 26, a former Germantown Academy standout who grew up in Conshohocken and was a member of an elite swimming family - another sister is an all-American at the University of Virginia - was deeply concerned about the safety aspects of open-water competition.
Maddy Crippen said that on Sunday, her brother's girlfriend had forwarded to her a draft memo he had written advocating, among other things, the presence of qualified medical personnel at meets.
"Fran wanted to make sure that we were doing everything right," she said. "He was going to take that cause on himself. He wanted to be the face of open-water swimming."
While marathon open-water racing dates to the ancient Japanese and the Roman Empire, it did not become an Olympic event until 2008.
Experts say the hazards have yet to be fully vetted.
"We have never researched our sport like other sports have," said Steven Munatones, a current member of the FINA open-water technical committee.
Thomas Lurz, the German who won the al-Fujayrah event, said on Sunday that the air and water temperatures were dangerously high. Lurz said the water was at least 86 degrees, though one official said it was 84. Three other swimmers reportedly were hospitalized.
Munatones said no country had set upper thermal limits for water in a sport where competitions are held in the Caribbean, South Pacific, and Florida.
