How your ticket helps swimming champ get everyone in the pool
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“AS A CHILD, I never dreamt of making the Olympics,” explains Alice Dearing. “To prove my younger self wrong was special.”. If the idea of becoming the first black woman to swim for Team GB in an Olympic Games seemed a lofty ambition – she achieved it in 2021 in Tokyo – the next target is bigger still.
![[Alice set up the Black Swimming Association and is a National Lottery Game Changer]](https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/da4035d5-2e4e-4bf6-9f18-e67139803839_14bcc8.jpg?strip=all&w=960)
“I’d love to see a world where everybody knows how to swim,” she says. “It sounds idealistic, but what harm can it do to dream a bit bigger?”. Alice, 27, became a world junior champion in 2016. Following her retirement from competitive marathon swimming at the end of last year, she would gain much satisfaction from seeing other black swimmers in her wake.
However, it is the goal of instilling the basics where she is most energised, because that would mean saving and enriching lives. As co-founder of the Black Swimming Association (BSA), Alice is advocating for water safety skills for black and Asian minorities in the UK, and eventually globally.
Sport England figures say that 95 per cent of black adults and 80 per cent of black children don’t swim. Nor do 93 per cent of Asian adults and 78 per cent of Asian children. “We don’t even have a statistic on how many people can’t swim!” Alice adds.
In 2022, thanks to National Lottery funding, the BSA was able to launch an initiative, Together We Can. “It’s a five-week water orientation course that gives people who might never have been in a swimming pool before the opportunity to see what it feels like, eventually leaving them in a place where they can learn to swim,” Alice explains.
