The 20-year-old swimmer tied with Canada’s Penny Oleksiak for the fastest swim time in the women’s 100-meter freestyle.
Advertisement
United States’ gold medal victor Simone Manuel cries during the medal ceremony for the women’s 100-meter freestyle final during the swimming competitions at the 2016 Summer Olympics, Friday, Aug. 12, 2016, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
“I think it means a lot, especially what’s going on in the world today with some of the issues with police brutality”.
“This medal is not just for me, it’s for some of the African-Americans who have been before me and been inspirations”, she said.
Meyer first met Ledecky and her family a few years ago at a conference.
The U.S. holds the world record, at 3:52.05 – a time that the American team clocked at the London 2012 Games.
Simone Manuel, a 20-year-old black female swimmer, and Simone Biles, a 19-year-old black female gymnast, dominated in two sports in which most U.S. competitors are white.
Yup. Rather than covering a member of Team USA making history as it happens, NBC instead chose to air seven-hour old footage of a member of the Russian gymnastics team performing. The statistics are startling: 68.9 percent of African-American children had “low or no swim ability”, according to a 2010 study commissioned by USA Swimming and conducted by the University of Memphis. “It was important for me to do that for her because even at that time I saw she could do something special”.
“Coming into the race I tried to take weight of the black community off my shoulders”, Manuel also said.
“With Simone Manuel winning, she’s going to inspire a generation, not only of black children and African-Americans, but young girls as well”, he said.
Now he’s part of the team trying to teach kids to swim. “It is for some of the African Americans who have come before me”, she concluded.
Manuel finished at Rio with two gold medals and two silver medals.
This is the world that Manuel wants to change, the behavior reinforced by racial stereotypes that she wants to do away with. “They might be pretty good at it”.
But, then, as I looked around at the pool and the beach, I realized that my husband and son were nearly always the only black swimmers there. Slowly and methodically, black people were implicitly discouraged from engaging in water sports and learning how to swim.
“I want to finish my career how I want to so that’s what I’m doing”, Phelps said.
Advertisement
Mercury News sportswriter Tim Kawakami wrote on Twitter: “Sorry to my tremendous co-workers, but I’ve never been as upset at a headline in my own publication as I was with that one”.
