The marathon swimmer is also a major advocate for more diversity and representation in aquatics
Olympics She has an impressive career outside of swimming, too. With the huge number of 35 pool swimming events wrapped up at the Olympic Aquatics Centre at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, today (August 5) attention turned to the open water swimming event of marathon swimming. Hoping to make it to the podium was Team GB swimmer Alice Dearing, the first ever female Black athlete to represent Great Britain in a swimming event at the summer Olympics. Dearing is a British swimmer born 23 April 1997, who grew up in Oldbury, a town in the suburbs of Birmingham, England. According to an interview with Channel 4, she picked up swimming at age nine at a local pool. Dearing,25, continued to train throughout her teens, waking up before school at 4:30am and sometimes not returning until after 7pm whilst she was still studying at the Royal Wolverhampton School, per the Express and Star. Not every teen would be able to maintain the commitment to her grueling training regime, but Dearing stuck with it. “I’d have a wobble pretty much every year where I was like ‘I don’t know if I want to do this’, struggling with having to juggle academics and a social life, which is nearly non-existent as a swimmer,” she told Channel 4 in 2019. But she kept going. She landed a place at Loughborough University to study Social Media and Political Communication, and per Swimming World Magazine is coached by Andi Manley.
