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Cullen Jones, Swimmer
On July 4, 2008, at a preliminary competition at
the United States trials for this year's Summer Olympics, Cullen
Jones swam the 50-meter freestyle race in 21.59 seconds, slicing .17
seconds off the American record in that event, set by Gary Hall Jr.
in 2000. Jones's time remained a U.S. record only until the next
day, when Garrett Weber-Gale swam the same distance in 21.47 seconds
in a race in which Jones came in third, thereby losing a chance to
compete in the 50-meter race at the Olympics. Thanks to another
third-place win at the trials, in the 100-meter freestyle, the
six-foot five-inch Jones, along with three other Americans, is
slated to race in the 4x100-meter relay in Beijing, China, the site
of the 2008 Summer Olympics. Jones, who has trained in swimming
since the age of five, is among the world's greatest sprinters, as
those who specialize in the 50-meter freestyle are known. He is a
standout on the men's U.S. Olympic swimming team, in part because he
is the only African-American on the squad and only the third black
swimmer to compete for the U.S. since the Games began, in 1896. (The
others are Anthony Ervin, in 2000, and Maritza Correia, in 2004.) In
addition, the 24-year-old Jones has resolved to try to decrease the
rate of accidental drowning among African-American and Hispanic
children—a rate that is three times greater than that among their
white counterparts—through his efforts in several programs. One of
them, Make a Splash, was started by USA Swimming (the “national
governing body of competitive swimming in the United States,”
according to its Web site); another, Begin to Swim, was organized by
the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) and is dedicated to
teaching children of color how to swim and remain safe in water.
Jones also hopes that his high-profile appearance at the Olympics,
to be held from August 6 to August 24, 2008, will help increase the
popularity of swimming among blacks, who represent less than 1
percent of the nation's 232,000 competitive swimmers. Referring to
the African-American golfer Tiger Woods, who is among the most
successful golfers—and athletes—in history, Jones told Ned Barnett
for the Raleigh, North Carolina, News & Observer (December 26, 2005,
on-line), “After Tiger Woods started playing, he was glamorized by
everyone. There was a huge increase in the number of
African-Americans playing golf. I would hope that if I were blessed
to go to the Olympics, it would strike a chord with African-American
kids.”
Cullen Jones was born on February 29, 1984 in the
New York City borough of the Bronx to Ronald and Debra Jones. He
developed a passion for being in the water at a young age, following
a near-death experience. When he was five years old, his parents
took him to an amusement park, Dorney Park & Wildwater Kingdom, in
Allentown, Pennsylvania, where, despite the objections of his
mother, he went down a water slide in a flotation device. Although
he heeded his father's advice and held on to the device tightly, he
landed upside-down in the water at the bottom of the slide and lost
consciousness. His mother jumped in and pulled him out, and
lifeguards were on hand to resuscitate him. When Jones came to, he
coughed up a pint of water; then, as he told John Henderson for the
Denver Post (May 4, 2008), he immediately said, “What's the next
ride I'm getting on?” Within a week of that incident, Jones's mother
had enrolled him in a swimming class. At eight he began swimming
competitively. “Cullen was happy anywhere he could find water,” his
mother, a health-and-safety policy manager for the Public Service
Electric and Gas Co., told Meredith Galante for the Newark, New
Jersey, Star Ledger (August 3, 2006). “He would compete in a meet,
and then ask to go back in the water just to play.” As a young boy
Jones also took gymnastics lessons, which helped him with swimming
because, as he told Bob Schaller for the USA Swimming Web site,
“When the coaches taught me flip turns at swim practice, they didn't
have to tell me twice because I had learned how to flip in
gymnastics.”
When Jones was young his family relocated to the
town of Irvington, New Jersey, immediately outside the city of
Newark (some sources list his hometown as New Brunswick, New
Jersey). Swimming helped Jones to avoid the drug activity and
gang-related violence in his neighborhood. He participated in the
Newark Swim Club, which practiced at the pool at the Newark campus
of Rutgers University, and competed in the Newark Long Course Swim
Championship when he was 13. For high school he enrolled at St.
Benedict's Preparatory School, also in Newark, and became active on
the school's swim team under his coach and mentor, Edward Nessel, a
former state Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) champion. Jones told
Schaller that he gave up his other pursuits in favor of swimming.
“As a kid I was definitely that pool rat that you couldn't get out
of the water,” he said. “I stopped playing basketball in high
school—I didn't go out for the team—because I wanted to focus on
swimming.” Jones's father, a former college basketball player, was
initially reluctant to embrace his son's chosen athletic activity,
preferring that he pursue basketball or football instead. “Ron would
come to every practice and exchange banter with me,” Nessel told
Galante. “Ron felt his son should be shooting hoops, but Cullen
didn't really like it. He only played to please his father.” When
Jones’s parents pulled him out of swimming competitions, his grades
began to fall, and his parents promptly allowed him to return to the
sport. Jones has credited his mother for that decision: “She was
just like ‘OK, you need the structure of swimming,'” he told Craig
Lord for the London Times (March 23, 2007). “I was never pulled out
again.” Nessel convinced Ronald Jones that his son's training would
be worthwhile. “I told Ron that I was going to make Cullen the best
swimmer in the state and send him to college for free,” Nessel told
Galante.
Ronald Jones eventually became one of his son's
biggest supporters. The swimmer said in his interview with Schaller,
“Once he saw swimming was what I wanted to do, he was 100 percent
behind me—even when he and I knew I wasn't any good at it! He would
sacrifice all the time—selling something he had or going without
[things] to, say, buy me new goggles.” Ronald Jones, a nonsmoker,
died of lung cancer in 2002, when Jones was 16. “It was so sudden;
one day he was healthy and the next day he was sick and dying—it
happened fast, even though he did fight it with a lot of
determination,” Jones told Schaller. His father's death motivated
Jones to excel in swimming; he told Lord, “I pretty much dedicated
my entire career to him.” Not long afterward Nessel quit his job as
a pharmacist to become a full-time swimming coach, taking Jones on
as his main pupil. Nessel, whose two sons had died, looked upon
Jones almost as an adopted son. Jones told Ned Barnett that his
father and Nessel are “the reason I continue to swim” and shared a
memory of the two men: “I remember there was a horrible rain storm
in New Jersey. It was an outdoor pool. I'm swimming and I get to the
wall, and I look up and I see my coach. He's got on large glasses
and a safari hat—a sun hat—and my dad is standing next to him with
his umbrella just trying not to get wet, but they were cheering me
on. It's one of those things I'll never forget. I'll die with that
memory.” Jones learned valuable lessons from his coach; Nessel
taught him not to “fight the water” and warned him that starting too
quickly during a race often means losing steam toward the end. With
Nessel's help Jones began to receive recognition; during his senior
year, in 2002, he won both state and regional prep-school
championships in the 50-yard freestyle. Jones told Galante that
Nessel was so determined to help him reach the top of his sport that
he “would always walk me to the blocks before a race. He would tell
me to ‘breathe.' That was always the most important thing—to calm
down and breathe.”
Jones's training paid off when he was accepted on
a scholarship to North Carolina (NC) State University. There he
joined the school's swimming and diving team, also known as the
Wolfpack, while majoring in English with a minor in psychology. In
2004, under coach Chad Onken, Jones won the 50- and 100-yard
Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) titles for NC State, becoming one of
the fastest sprinters in ACC history. In his interview with
Schaller, Jones said that the NC State team was like “family” to
him. “We had our Wolfpack Appreciation Day at a meet against Georgia
Tech. . . . At the meet [the team] presented me with a ring for
winning the ACC . . . 50 and 100, and had my Mom there,” he said. “I
mean . . . the time, the effort, the gesture—even the thought
itself—that means so much.” By the end of his college career, Jones
had seven ACC championships under his belt, in the 50- and 100-meter
freestyle and the 200-meter medley relay.
During his college years Jones made an
unsuccessful bid for a spot on the U.S. team at the 2004 Olympic
trials, failing to make it past the 50-meter preliminaries. Overcome
by the pressure of the event, he “froze a little bit,” as he
explained to Beth Harris for the Associated Press (November 29,
2007). He bounced back in 2005, when he made his international debut
in the World University Games in China, receiving the gold medal in
the 50-meter freestyle. In October of that year, he was named to the
National “B” Team, USA Swimming's second-tier squad of swimmers, and
in April 2006 he set the championship record for the 50-meter
freestyle, at 21.31 seconds, in the semifinals at the FINA World
Short Course Championships, also in China. He graduated from NC
State in 2006.
That summer Jones had a breakthrough performance
at the ConocoPhillips USA Swimming National Championships in
Indianapolis, Indiana, when he beat one of his role models, Gary
Hall Jr., in the 50-meter freestyle. Also that summer Jones signed a
six-year contract, estimated to be worth around $2 million, with
Nike Inc. With the backing of the sportswear giant, Jones began to
train for the 2008 Olympics and mounted a campaign to tour public
schools in the Raleigh, North Carolina, area to educate students
about water safety. “Nike has provided me the opportunity to develop
as an athlete and a person,” Jones said after signing the deal,
according to Swimming World Magazine (August 30, 2006, on-line).
“When I evaluated who could help me both in chasing my dream of
representing the U.S. in the Olympics and being able to speak out to
the African-American and Hispanic communities about the importance
of water safety, drowning prevention and learning to swim, I felt
that Nike had the best access to a platform where I can reach
millions of kids and deliver this message. The thought of joining
Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, and Lance Armstrong in the Nike family
is awe inspiring.”
In November 2006 Jones was named “breakout
performer of the year” at a prestigious swimming-awards event—the
Golden Goggles Awards—for his double-gold-medal performance that
summer at the Mutual of Omaha Pan Pacific Championships, in
Victoria, British Columbia, commonly referred to as the “Pan Pacs.”
There, he won the 50-meter freestyle event in 21.84 seconds, then
the sixth-fastest time ever, as a member of the U.S. team that set
the new world record in the 400-meter freestyle relay, and he became
the first African-American swimmer to break a world record. The
following year was a challenging one for Jones; he was disappointed
when he took home the silver medal in the 50-meter freestyle,
finishing behind his teammate Ben Wildman-Tobriner, at the March
FINA World Championships in Melbourne, Australia, and he came in
second to Wildman-Tobriner again at the August U.S. nationals, where
he lost by two-100ths of a second. Jones told Harris, “I got a taste
of what . . . [success] felt like and I got really lackadaisical in
my training. I just got really happy with where I was.” Sabir
Muhammad, a former sprinter for Stanford University and a U.S.
national team member, told Harris that in sprinting the margin of
victory is often extremely small. “What a lot of people really need
to understand about sprinting is that on any given day you're
separated by a hundredth of a second,” he said. “Just the simple
fact [that Jones] . . . is consistent with swimming under 22
seconds, which the percentage of swimmers that can do that is very
small, is remarkable.”
In 2007 Jones returned to New Jersey to teach
swimming and water safety in the YMCA's Begin to Swim program,
funded by the Toyota Motor Corp. and held at YMCA sports facilities.
According to a study conducted by USA Swimming, while about three
Caucasian children out of 10 are unable to swim, about six out of 10
African-American children lack that skill, a number that often
reflects their parents' inability to swim. At Begin to Swim classes,
Jones talks to participants about safe behavior in the pool and his
experiences as a swimmer. He told Aimee Berg for WCSN.com (April 15,
2008), “I believe there's a reason I'm in the position I'm in. If
there's just one kid that I haven't talked to yet, then I need to do
it for that kid. But also for myself.”
In 2008 Jones left his longtime coach Brooks Teal
and, acting on advice from Mark Schubert, the head coach of the U.S.
national team, hired the coach David Marsh to train him. The two
started working together on April 7, only 81 days before the U.S.
Olympic trials. “With every sprinter I've ever coached, I've done
some stroke changing,” Marsh told Aimee Berg. “But in this short of
a window, there isn't time.” Jones “needs to get substantially
faster,” he continued, “and there are several ways to do it. First,
we have to connect his strength to his swimming strength. There's
vertical strength”—Jones can jump 35 inches vertically—“and prone
strength and we have to apply the vertical to water. Second—the
starts. There's always hundredths of a second to find there.
Third—race strategy. And fourth—probably most important, his focus
and confidence when he steps on the blocks.” Marsh also said, “You
don't need to reinvent an athlete like Cullen. He's a world-class
sprinter.”
Although Jones set an American record of 21.59
seconds in the 50-meter freestyle swim during the preliminary
Olympic trials, on July 4, 2008, his third-place finish the next day
in the same event eliminated him from the official 50-meter race.
With his third-place finish in the 100-meter freestyle final on July
5, which he swam in 48.35 seconds, he qualified for the 4x100-meter
relay. His fellow swimmers in that race will be Nathan Adrian, Ricky
Berens, and Klete Keller.
Jones swims five to six hours a day, six days a
week. Since he is under contract with Nike, he is not permitted to
wear the Speedo LZR Racer bodysuit, which was designed for maximum
streamlining; since its introduction, in February 2008, several
swimmers have broken world records while wearing one. Jones is
currently involved in the making of a documentary by Do Tell
Productions about a swim team comprised of inner-city Boston,
Massachusetts, youth. Jones's girlfriend, Maritza Correia of Puerto
Rico—who in 2004 became the first female swimmer of color to
compete for the U.S. in the Olympics—will also appear in the
documentary. According to Mike Celizic, writing for
today.msnbc.msn.com (June 9, 2008), another documentary, to be
called “Parting the Waters,” will focus on Jones and Correia and
“the pioneering blacks who preceded them.” Tattooed on the back of
Jones's neck is his father's basketball-jersey number, 41.
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