Download The Three-Year Swim Club: The Untold Story of Maui's Sugar Ditch Kids and Their Quest for Olympic Glory AudioBook Free
For listeners of Unbroken as well as the Males in the Boat comes the inspirational, untold tale of impoverished children who altered themselves into world-class swimmers. In 1937, a schoolteacher on the island of Maui challenged several poverty-stricken sugars plantation kids to swim upstream against the existing of their circumstances. The goal? To become Olympians. They faced apparently insurmountable obstacles. The kids were Japanese-American, were malnourished and barefoot, and got no pool; they been trained in the filthy irrigation ditches that snaked down from the mountains into the sugarcane areas. Their future is at those same areas, working alongside their parents in digital slavery, known not by their titles but by numbered tags that hung around their necks. Their educator, Soichi Sakamoto, was an ordinary man whose swimming ability didn't prolong much beyond treading drinking water. In spite of everything, including the virulent anti-Japanese sentiment of the late 1930s, in their first calendar year the kids outraced Olympic runners double their size; in their second calendar year, they were national and international champs, shattering American and world details and making headlines from LA to Nazi Germany. In their third calendar year, they'd be announced the greatest swimmers on the planet, but they'd also face their greatest obstacle: the dawning of a world conflict and the cancellation of the game titles. Still, on the battlefield, they'd become the 20th century's most celebrated heroes, and in 1948 they'd have one previous opportunity for Olympic glory. They were the Three-Year Swim Golf club. That is their tale.
