Sabir Muhammed is a good example of black swimmers being encouraged by other black swimmers. He began as a youngster on the City of Atlanta Dolphins (CAD) swim team, the second largest black swim team in the country. He said he and his teammates didn’t know that what they were doing was not something most black kids did.

That’s like my cousins growing up in Chicago.  They went to an all black high school, and all swam on the swim team. I was in awe of that. To have been able to do that. . .

Back to Sabir Muhammed.  He was the first black swimmer at Stanford University in 1994. He finished in the top 16 in the 1996 Olympic trials. Unfortunately, he never realized his Olympic dream.

That wasn’t the end of swimming for Muhammed, though. He also recognizes how dangerous it is for young black kids not to know how to swim. In 2001, he created Swim for Life! which was the basis for the Make a Splash program I mentioned here.  Running the program in Atlanta, Muhammed ran into issues like pool renovation and maintanance, which were expensive hurdles. Then came other issues like scheduling and standardization of how lessons were taught.

When USA Swimming chose Atlanta as the first site for Make a Splash in 2004, Swim for Life! had paved the way, and the two sort of merged.

Sabir Muhammed continues to encourage young swimmers, as he was spotted at an Atlanta children’s swim meet recently. And he still swims, having just competed in the US Nationals.

So he reached for the pinnacle of his sport, took action against drowning, and continues to swim to this day. Sounds like a role model to me.

All’s well that ends well, I guess. The Philadelphia day camp children not only got a trip to Disney World, but they also got their pool time.

According to this article, Girard College, a private Philadelphia boarding school offered its facilities to the Creative Steps Day Camp.  The school, for children from low income and single parent homes, had no problem with the complexion of the Creative Steps group.

Girard College was already serving 500 children, but had no problem accomodating 65 more–belying the argument given by the Valley Swim Club as the ‘real reason’ for the ‘misunderstanding.’ After the ‘complexion’ and ‘atmosphere’ remarks, the Valley Swim Club had said, no, it’s really just a question of space.

As of early July, Senator Arlen Spector was to look into the allegations of racism.  So, let’s see. The Creative Steps Day Camp kids ended up with: a trip to Disney World, a new swimming contract, and a free day of icecream and candy making, sponsored by Gumdrops & Sprinkles. And the Valley Swim Club gets. . . rid of the day camp kids, closed for fear of protests, and a federal investigation.

And some people say nothing’s changed.

I must have been under a rock for the past 8 years. I mean, how could the ‘most famous’ black swimmer have slipped out from under my consciousness?

If I had watched him swim in the 2000 Olympics, I probably would have blocked it from my memory. It was that much of a train wreck.  In a human interest story kind of way, of course.

He came from Equitorial Guinea, a small African nation.  Eric Moussambani learned to swim in Jaunary 2000, when FINA, swimming’s governing body invited his nation to participate in swimming in the Olympics for the first time ever. He made it to the Olympics without having the minimum requirements by a wildcard draw to encourage countries without expensive  facilities to participate.

Why? I wonder.  Why would FINA set a swimmer up like this?  Sure, he was a crowd favorite, like the little engine that could, and it is impressive that he would finish, considering he’d only been swimming for 8 months, and the pool was bigger than any pool he’d ever seen, let alone swum in.

But to be exposed to the ridicule of the world, and then later lauded as the most famous black swimmer?  His only teammate, Paula Banila Bolopa finished with a similarly slow time, and received her own 15 seconds of fame.

Why couldn’t Equatorial Guinea take a few years to build their swim program?  Why not have given Erik 8 years rather than months to perfect his stroke and times?

I would rather not seeing any black Olympic swimmers than to see unprepared ones. I hope that FINA experiment is over.

I was just looking for information on the French swimmer, Malia Metella.  Unsurprisingly, I found little about her.  But I did find an interesting article written by David Owen in 2005.  What caught my attention was that in addition to  asking Metella about herself and her success as a swimmer (she won silver in the 50 free in Athens 2004), Owen asked her why there were so few black swimmers.

My immediate thought there is, why would she know that?  What does that have to do with her, really?

And then the article forgets her altogether and goes off in search of its answer.  Owen cites studies which point to blacks having denser, heavier skeletons, blah, blah, blah.  Then he finds another researcher who said that skeletons change quickly, and the reason for the dense skeletons may be the lifestyle of the person. So this thing perpetuates–black people generationally don’t swim, and their skeletons are denser because of the stress and work black people generationally do, and so on. In other words, because black people don’t swim, they don’t have ‘swimming skeletons,’ not the other way around.

Then they bring up the socio-economic reasons again, ignoring the one point Malia Metalla did have to make about the issue.  There’s just not a lot of encouragement for black swimmers, because they don’t see a lot of other black swimmers.  That is neither a poverty argument, nor an evolution argument.

It smacks of the truth.

I first heard this name back in 2006.  USA swimming was so serious about raising its minority profile. I didn’t think much of it at the time; certainly didn’t expect it to last.

But now I’m finding just what John Cruzat has brought to swimming in the US.  The former Army   Infantryman  was awarded the Bronze Star for actions in combat Desert Storm. After retirement, he was Vice President of the Urban League of the Pikes Peak region until USA Swimming recruited him.  He is the mind behind the Make a Splash program I talked about yesterday.

What I think is cool is that Cruzat is not just focused on the bottom end of the swimming scale–learn to swim initiatives.  He also created a Diversity Select Meet where children aged 13-18 had to post certain times before they would be accepted. This is from the application for the camp, held this year in March.

Purpose of the Camp: To instill a vision of success and inspire athletes from ethnically under-representedpopulations to become leaders in the sport of swimming. Coming to the Olympic Training Center to train with other selected athletes and meet with other coaches in a great environment is certainly motivational. The Camp also seeks to further empower the athletes and their coaches to achieve performance excellence and assist in recruiting more swimmers and coaches of color to the sport of swimming.

When Cruzat first got on board at USA Swimming, he was very excited and acknowledged that he couldn’t make changes overnight.  It’s been a few years now, and he has made some positive changes in the National Swimming scene.  I can’t wait to see what else he has up his sleeves!

Here are some grim statistics:

Nine people drown every day.

Six out of ten black children can’t swim.  That’s more than twice the number of their white counterparts.

The cycle continues: children from non-swimming households are more than 8 times more likely to be at-risk for drowning than those from swimming households.

Another wrinkle:  Whereas 1/3 white children from non-swimming households go on to learn to swim, the statistic for black children is only 1/10.

USA Swimming has created an initiative to address this problem. The Make a Splash iniative addresses the minority drowning problem by:

1. Educating parents

2. joining with grass roots learn to swim programs

3. funding free or low cost learn to swim programs

When the USA swim teams produces one black Olympic swimmer every 4 years, people cry foul. But here they are doing something way more significant–saving lives.  It’s pragmatic, too.  More black kids learning to swim can translate into more elite swimmers in the long run.

For more information, go to USA swimming.