Manuel swam first in that relay event but did something even more impressive on August 11th by being the first African-American women to win Olympic gold in a swimming event. “I’m just so blessed to have a gold medal”, she said. “My color just comes with the territory”, she said.
Advertisement
“There might be a young black boy or girl, and see that and say, ‘Wow, I want to learn to swim”.
But if there’s a breakout star of these Games in the pool, it has to be Simone Manuel, whose stunning victory in Thursday night’s women’s 100-meter freestyle – she tied atop the podium with Canada’s Penny Oleksiak, but so what – broke an Olympic record and achieved a milestone for diversity.
Carlos Tucker is the Aquatics Manager at The Salvation Army Ray and Joan Kroc Corps Community Center.
It’d be really nice if, rather than needing to apologize, backpedal, or provide too-little-too late responses, mainstream media outlets learned to get these things right in the first place.
She’s lighting an Olympic fire in the hearts and souls of members of the Mighty Krocs Swim Club. She was a symbol for what should have been self-evident all along: Swimming is for everyone. While her brothers eventually switched their focus to basketball, she kept swimming, eventually growing more serious about the sport as she reached high school.
Manuel said that her victory was extra special in the context of ongoing race issues in the U.S. This is what seemed to particularly strike a chord with LeBron, wrote the caption – alongside photos of both Biles and Manuel biting their gold medals – “Simone + Simone = Gold! I want to go to the Olympics one day, ‘” Robinson said.
“At the turn I kind of saw I was pretty far behind”, Oleksiak said. His mother, Debra, watched in fear – she couldn’t swim either and was unable to help her son when he fell out of his inner tube.
Manuel, who won a silver medal in the 4×100 freestyle relay Sunday night, was scheduled to swim in the semifinals of the 50 freestyle Friday night.
“I think it means a lot, especially what’s going on in the world today with some of the issues with police brutality”. She cruised to first in her 200-metre backstroke final and posted the second-fastest qualifying time behind Hungary’s Katinka Hosszu.
“I hope I can be an inspiration for others”.
Advertisement
The history of black Americans and swimming is a microcosm of the institutional racism that held back the United States for so long and still, sadly, exists in society today.
