Ann E. Smith, 82, and Madeline Murphy Rabb, 78, by no means imagined they’d start aggressive swimming careers of their 70s. The two took the plunge regardless of lingering misconceptions and stereotypes relating to what Black ladies ought to do of their golden years.
Their hours spent conditioning within the pool with their swim coach, Derrick Q. Milligan, paid off. Milligan based Team Dream, a Chicago-based group centered on coaching women-of-color athletes.
Smith and Rabb racked up gold and silver medals from regional and nationwide swimming competitions, and their story within the brief documentary Team Dream gained nationwide consideration.
“I am in the best condition I’ve ever been health-wise and physically in my life,” Rabb stated. “There is never a time that I go swimming that I don’t feel wonderful. To all of you who are not exercising, who are not saying, ‘Yes, I’m gonna try that,’ instead of, ‘No, I can’t do that,’ get off your butt and try something different.”
The 22nd Annual Aging Well Conference sponsored by the Levy Senior Center Foundation and others made fairly the splash Wednesday night time. The first day of the three-day convention was a screening of Team Dream within the Levy Senior Center adopted by a Q&A with Rabb and Milligan. Smith wasn’t in a position to attend. She’s busy touring round Europe, Rabb stated. Rob Bady, a Levy Foundation board member, led the Q&A session.
About 50 seniors stuffed the rows of seats to look at the 18-minute documentary. Team Dream follows Smith and Rabb within the closing days earlier than the 2022 National Senior Games in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The award-successful documentary reveals the ladies’s dedication to dwell lengthy, wholesome lives. Though successful isn’t the private purpose for both lady, they’re desperate to get to the end line and show others improper, concerning the limits of seniors and myths about Black individuals swimming.
Ageism isn’t the one impediment Team Dream faces head on. It exposes the ugly historical past of the parable “Black people can’t swim.”
The historical past of disinvestment in Black neighborhoods, segregation of swimming pools and seashores plus lots of of years of slavery within the United States fractured Black America’s relationship with water. As a outcome, generations of Black individuals didn’t discover ways to swim. An estimated 64% of Black kids don’t know find out how to swim, which makes them thrice extra prone to drown than white kids, based on a 2021 examine by the USA Swimming Foundation and the University of Memphis.
“It’s about access to pools,” Rabb stated. “It’s as simple as that.”
Rabb grew up in a segregated group in Baltimore, Maryland. There was one public pool the place she might swim and the remaining had been for white individuals solely, she stated.
She recalled being shocked by the lingering racial divide in swimming when she competed for the primary time within the National Senior Games in Albuquerque, N.M.
“We went to a public facility to compete, and it was gorgeous,” Rabb stated. “I looked up the cost, and it was ridiculously inexpensive. It was in a white community. This does not exist in our [Black] communities. That is the big issue: lack of access. It’s not desire, it’s not ability. It’s a lack of access.”
Milligan’s mother and father didn’t know find out how to swim, he stated. They broke that cycle by enrolling him in swimming courses when he was four years outdated. In flip, his kids began swimming at three months and 6 months outdated.
Milligan defined within the documentary and throughout the Q&A that lengthy earlier than the transatlantic slave commerce eroded Black individuals’s relationship with the water, many African tribes had been masters of the waters.
Through books like Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture within the African Diaspora, Milligan realized that Europeans documented African tribes’ deep sea diving, browsing and water exploration. That historical past was deliberately erased to forestall Black individuals from utilizing waterways to flee slavery, he stated.
“We can reverse that trend,” Milligan stated. “It’s [swimming is] for everybody. It’s great for lifestyle diseases that Black and brown people are hit with disproportionately. So your diabetes, your certain cancers, high blood pressure, heart disease, all that can be reversed.”
Smith and Rabb’s story left some viewers members impressed to turn into athletes themselves.
Richard Zusman is a swimmer who is popping 79 years younger in a couple of weeks, he stated. After listening to concerning the National Senior Games, he’s excited about swimming competitively once more.
“It inspires me to get up and keep moving,” Zusman stated.
