A person wearing a black swimming cap making a splash as they swim along a swimming pool lane alongside red and white floating markers. Achieng Ajulu-Bushell

Marine Saint

“I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,” T. S. Eliot’s words open the memoir of former elite swimmer Rebecca Achieng Ajulu-Bushell. Despite this tone of regret, what unfolds is a tale of dedication to swimming and a heartfelt search for closure.

Achieng Ajulu-Bushell’s first novel is an impressive feat. It encompasses her troubled relationship with the pressures of competitive swimming. Alongside this, it explores her teenage body and, in many ways, her lost childhood. We follow Achieng Ajulu-Bushell through these formative years in commanding prose. It is truly moving to see the now-adult woman connect with her younger self and scrutinize the painful memories.

While she may be haunted by the gruelling training programme and competition cycle of a swimmer, Achieng Ajulu-Bushell finds poetry in her pain. She cherishes the knowledge she holds for the precision and technique of this craft she spent countless hours perfecting. 

Published in time for this year’s Olympic season in Paris, These Heavy Black Bones offers an unusually lyrical insight into the life of a team GB swimmer. Achieng Ajulu-Bushell’s memoir grapples with her identity as a Black woman and what this means in the context of her sport. In 2010, she was the first Black woman to ever swim for Great Britain. Over ten years of competitive swimming, she swam for both Kenya and Great Britain, reaching world number one.

It’s a testament to Achieng Ajulu-Bushell’s ability to articulate these incredible achievements and the strain it created on her mental and physical health. The outcome: a complete immersion in these experiences where readers can vividly imagine the turmoil she faced turning away from her Olympic aspirations. 

An insight to an athlete’s displaced life

In charting her early life, Achieng Ajulu-Bushell is always conscious of her mixed race and Black identity. Her birth coincided with the fall of the apartheid regime in the early 1990s. Displacement and the sense of being “in-between” are what Achieng Ajulu-Bushell characterises for her childhood and teenage years. She was raised by her white mother around the world in Malawi, Reading, Kenya and Cape Town before boarding and training at Plymouth College. The school’s renowned swimming programme is where Olympian Tom Daley trained.

Achieng Ajulu-Bushell writes of her sense of disconnect with her father, a politics professor often lauded as a “political figure” after being exiled from Kenya. This presents the source of Achieng Ajulu-Bushell’s uncertainty with her heritage as the media fixated on the rising star’s family history. We do not learn about this in the memoir, but Achieng Ajulu-Bushell directed a documentary about her relationship with her father and his political role in 2019, titled Breakfast in Kisumu.

With both parents in academia, it seems fitting that she regained her love for studying, complete with a degree in Fine Art from the University of Oxford. The choice to pursue her studies would likely not have been possible if she continued her younger self’s all-consuming swimming lifestyle. Achieng Ajulu-Bushell now champions racial equity as CEO of the 10,000 Interns Foundation, a non-profit supporting unrepresented talent.

The turbulent relationship to swimming

The sound of her childhood was being told to swim. This becomes the only purpose and drive for “Achi” – her nickname – as she documents the demanding routine of 5am training and international competitions. These vivid scenes are partly ficticious but nonetheless read as an intimate and flowing insight into a highly unusual environment for a teenager.

It’s hard not to feel the inner conflict of Achieng Ajulu-Bushell’s relationship with herself and her Black identity, the notion of being the “first” for her sport, and sense of beauty. We are reminded of Toni Morrison’s iconic novel The Bluest Eye as Achieng Ajulu-Bushell fixates on her othered presence in a mostly white pool. 

It is the story of a young woman desperately living up to her accolades, even if success in swimming is short lived. We are plunged into the psyche of swim meets and dynamic with coaches – who aim for medals and perfect technique to curate a winning team.

The atmosphere hangs over us with each pregnant pause of anticipation before a race: ‘‘The silence at the start of the race is almost religious. The stadium is church-like, its congregation hangs from the stands.” Through all this Achieng Ajulu-Bushell poses the question of how much one should sacrifice for a sport. Her revisitation of the past is soul-bearing, bringing together years of an unconscious addiction to perfection. 

Crafting the pressure of making history 

Achieng Ajulu-Bushell adopts a structure reflecting the training cycle – prepare, develop, intensify, taper, race and recover. She documents build up to her peak performance in August 2009. This was when she ranked first in the world at just 15 years old.

The weight of this moment for her identity and career is emotively encapsulated by the former champion: “With this swim I was going to make a statement, my body had already decided that for me, not only as an accomplished swimmer but as the Black woman – because that’s what they’d called me – in one of the whitest sports in the world.”

“I would have swum till I drowned”

Achieng Ajulu-Bushell stepped away from swimming after losing out on her perfect swim to qualify for the Olympics. We are told the best swims happen in thirty seconds. But this memoir holds us on through intensity of ten years spent swimming with powerful introspection.

The relationship and love for the water, grounded in an understanding of its power over one’s body, drives much of the memories shared. Remembering and suffering go hand in hand. Achieng Ajulu-Bushell’s desperation to prove herself to her team catalyses some of the most harmful thoughts of her young life. She recollects: “‘I would have done anything for them then. I would have swum till I drowned.” 

The world of swimming schools investigated

With Achieng Ajulu-Bushell eventually quitting the world of competitive swimming, I wondered the extent to which her regimented training played a role. Last year the BBC published an investigation into the toxic swimming culture reported at some of the UK’s top swimming schools. Of the testimonies from former international champion swimmers, two came from Plymouth Leander Swimming Club.

Accounts of harmful routine weight checks, leading to long-term eating disorders and bullying were met with apologies from the Swim England Chief Executive last March. They promised a change in culture at the Plymouth club. As for Ajulu-Bushell’s former college, they told the BBC they took “welfare of students extremely seriously, with sporting excellence pursued within a safe framework.”

Nonetheless, her  memoir does not read as a shocking expose. Although, from an outsider’s perspective, the practices and lifestyle seem unsustainable for young athletes in the long run. Unanswered questions of the swimming culture aside, I wonder whether this memoir will offer reconciliation for Achieng Ajulu-Bushell? Whether watching athletes winning medals which had once been in her reach made Achieng Ajulu-Bushell hold her breath.

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Featured image courtesy of Ellyn Rivers on Flickr. No changes were made to this image. Image licence found here.

Columbia Journalism School M.S. Graduate 2024, Former Deputy Editor of Epigram and Bristol University BA English and History Graduate 2023.

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