These Heavy Black Bones

"It’s on the shortlist because of the quality of the writing. It’s beautifully written. Rebecca was the first black woman to represent Team GB, the British Olympic team, in the pool. Swimming is quite a difficult sport to write about. It’s pretty repetitive. It’s quite good fun at the Olympics when you’ve got a raucous crowd and you can hear the commentary over the top, and all the passion that a big sporting occasion brings. But if you strip it back, it’s relentlessly dull. It’s backwards and forwards and you can’t see the face of the person competing. They’re hidden by their goggles and the water. You’re just guessing what they might be thinking or feeling. What Rebecca does is she turns all that repetitiveness and the tough training into a form of poetry. There are passages where she’ll write about the relentlessness I’ve just described, but it sounds gorgeous. It might sound painful, but in a poetic way. She’s a black face in a sea of white faces at her college. There is the prejudice that ‘black people can’t swim’, that she has to deal with. She finds it very tough discovering her own identity in a strange world, whilst also trying to think like an elite athlete. I haven’t asked her, but I suspect there might be a narrative around her sporting career. She quit the GB team ahead of the 2012 Olympic Games: her promise fizzled out slightly. When that happens, there are invariably question marks about your commitment to the sport. In my opinion, she was trying to express, ‘This was very hard. I had so much stacked against me. I just ran out of…’ You can almost feel the air leaving her, the energy draining away towards the end of the book. It’s a way of saying, ‘This is my story. This is what it felt like from my point of view. I don’t care what it looks like from the outside—it looks like an unfulfilled ambition—but this is how difficult it is.’ She just couldn’t keep putting up with the tough training regime and the bias she perceived against her. You can learn as much from people who don’t quite make it as from those who do. That failure—although I’m sure Rebecca wouldn’t like me to call it a failure—underlines just how remarkable it is when someone does succeed. She’s showing us just how tough it is. You need those crumbs of victory to keep you going. That’s a really enjoyable element in the book—how those mini triumphs along the way help her put up with the early starts and the late finishes and the relentlessness of it."