Alice Dearing: Being Britain’s black swimmer
Aug 23, 2020, 11:45 AM
Open water swimmer Alice Dearing is often asked the same questions about being the black swimmer from Britain.
According to figures from Sport England, 95% of black adults and 80% of black children in England do not swim. Meanwhile just 1% of registered competitive swimmers with Swim England identify as black or mixed race.
Those numbers mean that 23-year-old Alice has essentially become the poster girl for black swimming.
It’s a role she takes in her stride. She co-founded the Black Swimming Association in March this year and has teamed up with SOUL CAP, a black-owned brand that creates larger swimming caps for those with larger hair.
In light of the Black Lives Matter movement too, questions about race and equality are rightly on the agenda. For Alice that means talking about those issues whenever it arises but it’s something that shouldn’t really exist in the first place.
In this podcast Alice also takes us through her most challenging moment when she was taken off of funding and left the national swimming centre back in 2017. As she says, her self-worth was wrapped up in swimming and that was a lesson she probably needed.
She also talks about sexism in women’s sport and the pressures from society that dictate sportswomen should look a certain way.
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Credits
Image credit: With thanks to Alice Dearing
Music: Otis McDonald