Why swimming remains a barrier for many black Britons

The smell of chlorine hits as I push through the pool doors, and instantly the nausea returns—a physical memory of why I've avoided swimming for over a decade. At 27, I'm back for my first lesson in more than ten years, surrounded by other black women at the water's edge, some confident enough to swim lengths, others like me still learning to trust the water beneath them. I'm learning to breathe properly, to let my body surrender rather than fight. It's harder than it sounds.

I am far from alone in this struggle. According to Swim England, the sport's governing body, 67% of black women and 44% of black men in England cannot swim 25 metres unaided—figures that dwarf the national average and stand in sharp contrast to white swimmers, of whom only 17% of women and 12% of men lack this basic ability. These numbers, published in 2022, represent not just a gap but a chasm, one that has persisted for decades without clear explanation. The stakes are not abstract: black children in England drown at more than three times the rate of white children, according to the National Child Mortality Database, which tracked deaths between 2019 and 2025. In the summer of 2026, as record heat drove people toward water, drowning deaths climbed again, with black children and adults consistently over-represented among the dead.

One of the most stubborn explanations for this disparity is also one of the most false. For centuries, a myth has circulated that black people have denser bones, making them inherently less buoyant than white people. The idea has deep roots: 15th-century European accounts actually praised West Africans as skilled swimmers and divers, but racial segregation in the United States—particularly the exclusion of black people from public pools—gradually inverted this narrative. By 1974, just years after segregation formally ended, two white doctors published an article in a respected medical journal asking whether black people could float at all, concluding they simply could not. In 2023, researchers from the University of Portsmouth, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, and the Black Swimming Association set out to test this claim directly. Of 101 participants in their study, 89 floated unassisted for two minutes. Bone density, they found, predicted nothing about buoyancy. The myth, however, has proven far more durable than the science that debunks it. Alice Dearing, a former Olympic swimmer and co-founder of the Black Swimming Association, suggests that some black people have internalized this false belief so deeply that it shapes their relationship with water itself. At 17, Dearing experienced this prejudice directly when a coach used a racial slur about her to another swimmer. She complained to her club and school but ultimately chose not to pursue the matter further. "Why am I being victimised for swimming and for being black?" she recalls thinking. "It just didn't make sense."

But myth alone does not explain the numbers. Family patterns matter profoundly. For most British children, swimming begins at home—if parents swim, children grow up seeing water as familiar territory. In my own family, none of my five siblings can swim, nor can my parents. We went to the beach, but rarely ventured deeper than our knees. Nathaniel Cole, co-founder of Swim Dem Crew, a group working to increase participation among people of colour, has watched this cycle repeat. He remembers coaching children whose parents could not swim, then encouraging those parents to enter the pool alongside their children. "But then the parents would be like, 'Well, I can't swim,'" he says. When parents fear the water, children inherit that fear. Cole describes swimming underwater as something to be avoided in families where no one swims—a place of danger rather than possibility. Dearing's experience was different. Her mother grew up swimming in the ocean in Accra, Ghana and was determined her children would learn. Swimming was passed down in her family. In mine, it was not.

Class and geography compound these inherited patterns. Kevin Hylton, an emeritus professor of equality and diversity in sport at Leeds Beckett University, grew up in a working-class Caribbean family where swimming simply was not done. "We had almost zero leisure as a family together," he recalls. "It was done through school." His own children had a different childhood—by then, he and his partner had more disposable income and lived closer to pools. The difference, he emphasizes, was not ethnicity but class and proximity. Sport England data bears this out: 47% of children in the most deprived areas can swim 25 metres, compared with 69% in the least deprived. Yet even accounting for poverty, a particular disparity persists. In 2022, Swim England examined adults in the poorest neighbourhoods specifically. On average, 73% could swim 25 metres, but for black adults in those same neighbourhoods, the figure dropped to just 38%. Access itself has become harder. More than 500 public swimming pools have closed across the UK since 2010, with nearly half of those closures occurring since 2020. Swim England and ukactive, the trade body for gyms and leisure centres, classify one-fifth of local authorities as "water deprived," lacking sufficient pool space for their populations.

Cultural factors add another layer. A 2023 survey by the Black Swimming Association of more than 1,400 people found that 33% of black British respondents cited hair care as a barrier to swimming. Traditional swimming caps do not accommodate longer, thicker afro hair or black hairstyles like braids, dreadlocks, and extensions with twists. The infrastructure of swimming, it turns out, was not built with black bodies in mind.

Back at my lesson, something shifts. I'm floating on my front, then on my back, doing things I never believed possible. My instructor, Omie Dale, watches with quiet pride. "You're floating," she says. My fear began in primary school during compulsory swimming lessons, surrounded by dozens of children at different levels, feeling overwhelmed rather than taught. Swimming became synonymous with terror. But Dale has seen this pattern before. Many of her students have not had a lesson since primary school, leaving years to pass before they return. She runs free classes and watches young people discover they are natural swimmers, children who might otherwise have grown up convinced they could not be. Visibility matters too. At the highest levels of competitive swimming, black representation remains nearly invisible: of 73,000 swimmers registered with Swim England in 2019, fewer than 668—less than 1%—identified as black or mixed race, despite black people making up about 4% of England's population. In 2020, Dearing became the first black British woman to represent Team GB in swimming at an Olympic Games. Sport England research shows that the absence of visible role models reinforces negative stereotypes about the abilities of people from ethnically diverse backgrounds. "No one wants to be the only black person in the pool," Cole says.

When I emerged from the water after my lesson, I felt something unexpected: the desire to return. For years, I had accepted my inability to swim as fixed, easier to avoid than to confront. I am still far from confident, but the world has opened slightly—the sea, rivers, lakes, kayaking, paddleboarding all suddenly seem possible rather than dangerous. Dale describes swimming as a gateway. Once you learn, she says, "it opens a whole new world." At 27, I am not yet a swimmer. But I am ready to become one.