Race and Ethnicity Commons^™

Sports Notes, Wornie L. Reed

Trotter Review

Another racial myth came tumbling down in the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, Korea. Blacks had never before been prominent in swimming competitions at the national level in the United States or at the international level. Several theories about the bone structure and body mass of black people have been offered to explain the absence of blacks on the victory stands at these top competitive levels. But at the 1988 Olympics Anthony Nesty, a black man from Surinam (South America), bested Matt Biondi, swimming’s golden boy in those Olympics, to win the 100-meter butterfly.