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The Three-Year Swim Club: The Untold Story of Maui's Sugar Ditch Kids and Their Quest for Olympic Glory - Paperback | Diverse Reads

The Three-Year Swim Club: The Untold Story of Maui's Sugar Ditch Kids and Their Quest for Olympic Glory

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The New York Times bestselling inspirational story of impoverished children who transformed themselves into world-class swimmers.

In 1937, a schoolteacher on the island of Maui challenged a group of poverty-stricken sugar plantation kids to swim upstream against the current of their circumstance. The goal? To become Olympians.

They faced seemingly insurmountable obstacles. The children were Japanese-American and were malnourished and barefoot. They had no pool; they trained in the filthy irrigation ditches that snaked down from the mountains into the sugarcane fields. Their future was in those same fields, working alongside their parents in virtual slavery, known not by their names but by numbered tags that hung around their necks. Their teacher, Soichi Sakamoto, was an ordinary man whose swimming ability didn't extend much beyond treading water.

In spite of everything, including the virulent anti-Japanese sentiment of the late 1930s, in their first year the children outraced Olympic athletes twice their size; in their second year, they were national and international champs, shattering American and world records and making headlines from L.A. to Nazi Germany. In their third year, they'd be declared the greatest swimmers in the world. But they'd also face their greatest obstacle: the dawning of a world war and the cancellation of the Games. Still, on the battlefield, they'd become the 20th century's most celebrated heroes, and in 1948, they'd have one last chance for Olympic glory.

They were the Three-Year Swim Club. This is their story.

ISBN-13: 9781455523450

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Publication Date: 06-21-2016

Pages: 448

Product Dimensions: 5.12(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.12(d)

Julie Checkoway is an author and documentary filmmaker. A graduate of Harvard, the Iowa Writers Workshop, and the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, she is also the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts individual artist grant and a Yaddo fellowship. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Salt Lake Tribune, and Huffington Post.

Table of Contents

Preface 1

Part 1 Such Stuff us Dreams (1932-1937)

Chapter 1 To Race with Giants 7

Chapter 2 Hardhead 23

Chapter 3 A Wide Awakening 40

Chapter 4 The Pursuit of Greater Ventures 55

Part 2 On Such a Sea (1938)

Chapter 5 An Exercise of Will 83

Chapter 6 Owing to the Protracted Hostilities 102

Chapter 7 Keeping 1940 in Mind All the Time 120

Part 3 Taken at the Flood (1939)

Chapter 8 Down Under 147

Chapter 9 Youths of the Sea 167

Chapter 10 The Coup 187

Part 4 A Tide in the Affairs of Men (1940-1941)

Chapter 11 A Season of Flame 205

Chapter 12 Santa Barbara 215

Chapter 13 Mr. Smith Comes to Maui 222

Chapter 14 Blitzkrieg 239

Part 5 Fall Seven Times, Get Up Eight (Nana korobi, ya oki) (1944-1948)

Chapter 15 Go for Broke 265

Chapter 16 Home Front 284

Chapter 17 Detroit, Redux (1948) 307

Chapter 18 Goals and Sacrifices 325

Afterword 347

Author's Notes 353

Section Notes 359

Three-Year Swim Club Members 389

Mahalo Nui Loa/Thank You 393

Reading Group Guide 405

Index 419

About the Author 431