Olympic history is emblazoned with the names of black Americans who have transcended sport to become figures of distinct social significance. Jesse Owens and Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan and Carl Lewis were celebrated beyond the boundaries of their physical activities. In the panoply of the Games, swimming stands out as the leading sport where blacks have failed to make a significant impact.

But now there is Cullen Jones. Muhammad Ali may have said, in one of his rasher statements, that “blacks can’t swim” but a performance at the Beijing Olympics may finally shoot down this canard. Jones is the first black American to hold a world swimming record, albeit in a relay alongside Michael Phelps, and he is now focused on qualifying for the US team in the 50m and 100m freestyle. Nike, whose backing of Tiger Woods has been one of the biggest marketing success stories of the last decade, is so enraptured that another black might break through in a sport previously dominated by whites that it has signed Jones on a sponsorship deal, reportedly worth up to $2m.

Jones would like to see himself as a similar pioneer to Woods, since there have only been six black swimmers from any country who have won medals in the 108 years of the modern Olympics, and these include Anthony Ervin, joint winner of the 50m freestyle in 2000, who was of mixed race. In the US, fewer than 1% of the country’s 230,000 competitive swimmers are African-Americans. Unlike athletics, basketball and boxing, it is dominated by college-educated whites.

Jones believes the barriers to blacks swimming are sociological, saying: “There is a mind-set and I am trying to break that barrier. Swimming is not regarded as a way of making a living. However, Tiger Woods broke the barrier and more and more people play golf now, thanks to seeing Woods play golf.” Of course, the rewards for golf, with its long career, are astronomical compared to competitive swimming, which only breaks into the consciousness of most Americans at the Olympics. However, Jones’s charity work on encouraging blacks into the water is not necessarily to inspire some successors at the Games but rather to persuade them to “swim for safety’s sake and for health’s sake”.

In his book Contested Waters, which looks at the social history of the sport in the US over the last century, Professor Jeff Wiltse records a long-standing lack of municipal pools for blacks, the early practice of segregation and the often violent opposition to mixed-race swimming. He believes these handicaps have never been overcome. The rates of drowning in the US are three times higher among blacks than the national average and Jones nearly became one of those victims at the age of five, when he was riding an inner tube at an amusement park. It flipped over, trapping him under water. He recalls: “When I got out of the water, I passed out. I coughed up water and everything. Luckily my parents were there and the lifeguard saw me.” A year later, he had learnt to swim, and by the age of eight was swimming in races. Jones explains: “I was naturally drawn to the water. I have to finish something to the end. I am really competitive.”

However, he was no prodigy in races, admitting: “My career was last place all the time.” His father, Ronald, who died in 2000, wanted him to take up basketball and even stopped him from swimming, but his mother Debra saw that the discipline of the training for sport helped him academically. Jones went to North Carolina State, where the training gradually changed him into a world-class swimmer. In 2006, he won the US national 50m title, defeating his original idol Gary Hall Jr, twice Olympic champion, with the fastest time in the world that year and then at the Pan Pacific Championships he won both the 50m and was a member of the US team that set a world record for the 4x100m relay.

Although he graduated in English and psychology from North Carolina State, he still trains alongside the university squad so he can remain with Brooks Teal, the college head coach. He has eight workouts a week of at least 5,000m each session. Teal says: “It has been slow coming. There have been African-Ameri-cans in the sport but none has excelled to the level that Cullen has done or been willing to embrace it the way Cullen does.”

One key factor has been the extensive use of weight-training to fill out a previously slender 6ft 5in frame. He weighs 15st 1lb, which gives him the muscle power to swim his best times for the 50m of 21.82sec and the 100m of 49.17sec. He is working particularly on his start, trying to improve his spring off the blocks and remain as compact as possible though the air to reduce air resistance. Tests show his reactions are well above average, and the freestyle sprints are usually won by a few hundredths of a second. Now 23, he is concentrating on the sudden-death Olympic trials in Omaha in June.

USA Swimming, the national governing body, is excited by the prospect of more blacks taking part in the sport. John Cruzat, its national diversity specialist, says: “Cullen has been a breakthrough. He is a role model and gracious with his time in encouraging blacks to swim. There are health disparities between blacks and whites, which swimming can help address, while his presence may also open up new pipelines into elite swimming.”

An added impetus for blacks to take up the sport was the release last year in the US of the film, Pride, which tells the largely true story of a team of blacks from Philadelphia who break into junior competitive swimming. Cruzat is hoping that increasing the “critical mass” of black swimmers will eventually mean more representatives in international swimming.

Twenty years ago, Anthony Nesty, a black man from Suri-name, created one of the biggest upsets in Olympic swimming history when he defeated the American Matt Biondi in the 100m butterfly. Trained at the University of Florida, where he now coaches, Nesty laments that there are not more blacks in swimming. He points to the expense, with training and constant travelling to events, but hopes the example of Jones will change things. He says: “What he has achieved is a testament to his desire and upbringing. It shows what can be done.”

Muhammad Ali was wrong: black people can swim

ENITH BRIGITHA
The first black athlete to win an Olympic swimming medal, she fi rst competed at the Games in Munich in 1972 as a 17-year-old. The following year she was named Dutch sportswoman of the year when she won silver and bronze at the world championships. She won bronze again for Holland in the 100m and 200m freestyle at Montreal in 1976.

ANTHONY NESTY
In 1988, the Surinamese, whose family had left Trinidad when he was a child, beat race favourite Matt Biondi by a hundredth of a second to win the 100m butterfl y at the Seoul Olympics, an achievement that was commemorated on bank notes in his country. Nesty took bronze in the same event in Barcelona in 1992.

ANTHONY ERVIN
Born to a white mother and black father, the American won gold in the 50m freestyle (in a tie) at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 and picked up a silver in the 4x100m relay. In May 2005, Ervin sold his gold medal on eBay for $17,500 and announced that he would be donating the money to a tsunami relief fund.

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