Simone Manuel will be at the grocery store, and someone might stop her and ask: ‘What sport do you do?’
“Sometimes I entertain them a little bit and I let them guess,” she says with a slight laugh, “and swimming is never their guess. When I end up telling them I swim, I kind of get some crazy eyes. I’ve gotten laughed at. I’ve gotten, ‘There’s no way that you’re a good swimmer,’ even though they look at my build.”
‘Actually,’ she will tell them, ‘I’ve won Olympic medals.’
Manuel was 20 in 2016 when she became the first Black woman to win an individual gold at Olympic swimming. Nearly 10 years later, she sometimes still feels dragged down by the heft and responsibility of the moment, and she still faces the stereotypes that are assigned to her race and sport.
‘The most common one is that Black people can’t swim,’ Manuel tells USA TODAY Sports. ‘I still hear that to this day, unfortunately. I’ve gotten comments from the Black community as well that we can’t swim.’
Manuel, 28, has won seven Olympic and 16 world championship swimming medals. She is seeking more, but spoke of another opportunity ahead of International Water Safety Day on Wednesday. In 2023, Manuel launched the Simone Manuel Foundation, with a goal of increasing opportunities and water safety in communities of color.
‘It’s about bringing swimming into spaces where people may not feel like they’re welcome, or they may not even feel like it’s an avenue for them to pursue,” she says.
According to a report by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released last May, nearly 64% of Black children have little to no swimming ability.
The statistic is decades in the making, reflecting America’s long history of racial intolerance at pools that conflicted a little girl in Sugar Land, Texas.
‘I began to question if swimming was the sport for me,” Manuel says.
She shared how getting her mind around her identity within her sports was a process filled with doubt. But she has acquired lessons from an often-excruciating athletic journey that might help parents and young athletes.
(Questions and responses are edited for length and clarity.)
Validating emotions can build a stronger athlete
Manuel tried other sports, but something came alive inside of her when she got in the pool. The water not only cooled her from the sweltering Texas heat, but filled her with confidence, pushing her up into training groups with older swimmers.
Then a voice in her head told her she should quit. Sharron and Marc Manuel helped their daughter understand what she was hearing. Sharron also would scroll the Internet with her young daughter, pulling up photos of past Black swimming champions like Olympic silver medalist Maritza Correia McClendon.
USA TODAY: How did your parents support you in swimming?
Simone Manuel: I think the biggest tangible thing was just continuing to allow me to be authentically myself, to continue to validate my experiences as a Black woman in this sport. Being one of a few is a really tough journey, and I know that as parents, they dealt with their own experiences and they were able to recognize that my journey was gonna be unlike other swimmers’ just because of, unfortunately, the color of my skin.
So a lot of their support came from encouraging me. When I would come home from practice and tell them, ‘Oh, someone said this,’ or, ‘This happened,” that alone helped me feel empowered. It allowed me to (feel) that I wasn’t crazy, that what I was experiencing was real, but then to use that as motivation to continue to fight for my goals and dreams.
Sports unify the world, but often isolate the athlete
When you swim, you spend a lot of time by yourself in the water, propelling toward the wall and not knowing if you will get there first. After Manuel touched the wall in Rio in 2016 to win the 100-meter freestyle, she realized how solitary a sport it can be.
USAT: You have felt pressure to be an example. Can you expand on that?
SM: I found out that I made history when I did the interview. At that moment, I just was trying to win a medal, but then for that moment to be really historic, nobody can prepare you for that. I think it was, in some sense, a heavy weight that I wasn’t prepared for. It’s not like I dive in a pool every day and I’m like, ‘I want to be the best Black swimmer.” I want to be the best swimmer that I can be. I can inspire my community (and) people beyond my community who may not feel like they fit into whatever particular endeavor that they want to pursue, but there is pressure that comes with it. I have learned that I will be my best when I focus on trying to be the best Simone, and that comes with my competition, with my advocacy. And the rest, even if it feels lonely at times, it’s really important for me to just try to stay true to myself.
It’s really important for me to continue to compete and do what I love to do, because hopefully there’s a young Black child watching me on TV, and they look at the screen and they say, “Hey mom, hey dad, I want to learn how to swim too.”
Again, a supportive family can make all the difference. Manuel’s older brothers played college basketball, Chris at Oklahoma Christian and Ryan at SMU.
“They always would encourage me,” she says. “They would ask me to come out and play, but they would show no mercy (laughs), and I appreciated that. I didn’t need them to take it easy on me. I had to take a couple of elbows and maybe lose by 20 points. But I mean, beyond that, they’re like my biggest supporters.
“At the end of the day, I’m just their little sister. It reminds me that I am a swimmer, but it’s not who I completely am.”
It takes courage to believe in yourself when you don’t fit the mold
Public pools dominated the American landscape for much of the 20th Century. These could be intimate spaces shared by friends and competitors, but also ones charged with racial strife.
Federal judges began declaring pool segregation unconstitutional before the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, but waves of American communities pushed back in the 1950s and 1960s. Instead of complying with desegregation, they closed pools, affecting generations of potential Black swimmers.
“And then on top of that, you have the rise of private pools, country clubs, people no longer going to public pools and having the access,” Manuel says. “The accessibility to backyard pools, in the Black community, is not something that we typically had in the past. Discrimination and racism have created these consequences.”
USAT: What was it like growing up in a primarily white sport?
SM: I didn’t feel like I fit in. I think it’s kind of normal to, at a young age, look around and not see other people that look like you. I don’t see any other Black children doing this, but when I’m on the soccer field, I see them. When I’m on the volleyball court, I see them. When I play basketball, I see them. So I really began to question if it was a sport group that I could be good at and successful in. But I think on top of that, just some of the experiences, some of the comments from teammates, parents, that make you doubt yourself, tacked on with what you’re already feeling, makes it very difficult to feel like the pool is a welcoming space.
I had supportive coaches who helped a lot with that. I learned that it was really important for me to own my dream, and that, unfortunately, this was a journey that I was going to have to go on. I was going to have to deal with these obstacles. We all do in life, and this was one of them that I had to hopefully conquer.
USAT: What would you say to young swimmers who look up to you?
SM: Believe in the power of your dreams. Believe in yourself and don’t let anyone keep you from pursuing your passion, because if it’s yours, it’s for you, and it’s not for them to take.
‘Drowning epidemic’: Swimming can help shed stereotypes
‘So many people are so terrified of the water,’ said Naji Ali, a long-distance swimmer who has hosted a podcast promoting swimming in the Black community. He spoke as a featured voice for a 2021 Philadelphia museum exhibit known as “Pool: A Social History of Segregation.”
“Whether you go in or not, you should know how to swim,’ he said. ‘And not just survival swimming, I’m talking where you are comfortable in the water.”
The Simone Manuel Foundation seeks better education – through water safety awareness workshops, swim lessons, clinics – in BIPOC (Black, indigenous and people of color) communities.
And it offers possibility.
USAT: What message do you want to share about the work that you’re doing?
SM: It would be great to see other Black swimmers on the podium. I don’t know if I will see that in my lifetime. But above that, I think it’s really about empowering the Black community to learn how to swim, because the drowning epidemic is so staggering.
USAT: What has sports done for you and for your life?
SM: Sports has allowed me to grow into a stronger, more resilient person. It’s given me some of my greatest achievements, but also some of my lowest lows. Sports (is) a microcosm of society, it’s a microcosm of life, and the experiences that I’ve had through have helped me handle difficult situations. I believe that swimming has really given me all the tools to be able to handle whatever comes my way.
Coach Steve: What the brash ex-swimmer learned about his career when he lost everything
Sports careers often remain ‘unfinished,’ no matter who we are
Manuel says that before Rio, she faced undisclosed “major health issues” that forced her to significantly modify her training.
‘There were times where I didn’t think I could go any further,” she says.
Before Tokyo, she developed overtraining syndrome. She spent six months out of the water recovering from mental and physical exhaustion, depression, anxiety, soreness and other symptoms.
She returned to win a bronze in Tokyo and a silver in Paris. She has described her career since Rio as not a comeback but unfinished, a perspective on how sports continue to teach throughout athletes’ lives.
USAT: You’re hoping to compete in Los Angeles in 2028. How is that going?
SM: It’s probably been the hardest training that I’ve ever done in my career, but it’s been really fun. I’m really excited what hopefully the next four years has to come.
My goal is always to win medals. I’m never been someone that sets low goals. But I also think it’s really important to be realistic. The last couple years have been really tough for me, so I just want to continue to improve, not put too much pressure on myself, and just see where my results land, and then adjust from there. So it’s hard to kind of give a definitive goal when something is four years away. I ultimately see my best results staying in the present.
USAT: You said your goal is to be able to compete without the weight of expectations. Do you think you’ve gotten to that point yet?
SM: No, I haven’t, unfortunately, I feel like I’m getting there. I’m starting to learn how to swim more for me. I do think it is gonna take some more work on my part, but expectations are good. Hopefully I continue to become more confident in what I’ve accomplished and what my resume says about me, that I can just step up on the blocks and not feel like I have to prove anything.
Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for two high schoolers. His column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.