Her mother didn’t have an answer.
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“I want to finish my career how I want to so that’s what I’m doing”, Phelps said. We pulled different articles and started reading. “I have friends who really want to pursue sports, but because of cultural barriers they weren’t able to”. Perhaps there will come a day when black swimmers are so accomplished in the program that their triumphs are indistinguishable from those of the rest of the group.
In addition to Phelps, we’ll also see newly minted Olympic champion Simone Manuel – who made history this week as the first African-American woman to win a gold medal in swimming. On the podium, she let tears stream down her face as the Star-Spangled Banner played.
“I am the first Emerati to represent my country, and it’s such a great honor and I really hope when I get back to the country I can have some sort of campaign to encourage women in sports, especially swimming”, she said. And its for all the people after me who believe they can’t do it. Access to pools has always been a challenge as African-Americans were often officially denied entrance to pools during segregation, then unofficially excluded in other ways afterward.
It is a victory for the many black girls who have endured being stereotyped and ridiculed, who have been mocked and criticized for being too concerned with their hair-factors such as pool access, finances and white supremacist beauty standards erased in order to perpetuate racist and dishonest narratives. She swam her 50-meter heat in 33.42 seconds, which was 9.19 seconds slower than the top time and ranked 78th overall. When it was over, Marc and Sharron Manuel couldn’t immediately see the videoboard with the results. Black swimmers got smaller indoor pools if they were lucky. “Her older brother was part of our summer swim team and mom said ‘Well, if I’m going to be here anyway, she might as well take some lessons.'” Manuel was just three years old at the time. McClendon also retweeted a quote that she gave to the BBC in which she said of Manuel’s win, “a generation of black kids will consider swimming as a sport”.
The relay of Kathleen Baker, Lilly King, Dana Vollmer and Simone Manuel won America’s first gold of the night in the final night of swimming competition here to reach the milestone. Manuel’s merely standing on the blocks and jumping into the water was a challenge in and of itself to “America’s most racist institution”: the swimming pool.
While the world and social media lauded her milestone, Manuel didn’t have time to celebrate.
“Coming into (Thursday’s) race, I tried to take the weight of the black community off my shoulders as it is something I carry with me being in this position”, Manuel said after her record-breaking swim. My wife, who is half Caucasian and half Japanese, tries to make me feel guilty about not swimming. The Olympics are nearly tailor-made for inspirational tales, but here are a few that stood out for me this first week.
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It’s a delicate balance, Sharron said, between embracing the significance of what this accomplishment means as an African-American woman and pushing the sport to the point where it’s not headline-worthy. In other words, she stands to use her medal to motivate lots of young African- Americans.
