Her Parents Thought Swimming Lessons Were a Good Idea
Somewhere in the middle of the pool, Krystal Lara began to wonder when her hand would brush tile. She knew she was winning her race, but like most backstrokers in unfamiliar waters, she had only a vague sense of how far she had left to go. With her face cocked upward, she discerned her progress by the overhead lights retreating out of sight in a fluorescent blur.
When her fingertips finally touched the end of the pool, at the Greensboro Aquatic Center in North Carolina last August, Krystal heard her teammates break into rapturous applause. She slid on her glasses and the figures on the scoreboard came into focus: 1:03.28 — just fast enough to qualify for the 100-meter event at the Olympic trials in Omaha this summer. Scanning the crowd of frenzied faces, Krystal locked eyes with her mother. The two exchanged a look of disbelief before breaking into tears.
“I just felt this huge sense of pride,” Krystal, now an 18-year-old senior atStuyvesant High School in Lower Manhattan, recalled. “Like all this work and all we’d been through had been worth it.”
Her mother, Alexandra Lara, remembered turning to the person next to her in the stands to explain her tears. “You don’t understand how hard it is for a family like ours to have this result,” she said.
Indeed, Krystal has risen to unlikely ranks in a sport bedeviled by persistent racial and socioeconomic gaps. She lives in a modest two-family ranch-style house in Willowbrook, Staten Island, with her parents and two younger siblings. Her father, Frederick Lara, 46, grew up in a Dominican-American family in Brooklyn; her mother immigrated to New York from Colombia.
Neither parent could pull off much more than a dog paddle, but they figured swimming lessons were a worthwhile way for their children to fill the languid summer months. Krystal took her first strokes at age 6, in a free program run by the parks department near her family’s home. Within a week, the instructors asked Krystal’s mother to put her on a competitive team.
“I never even had this in the back of my mind,” said Ms. Lara, 45. “When she first started swimming, I just wanted her to learn for safety reasons.”
When she gauges the competition, Krystal often finds that she is the only Latina in the pool. “You generally need to be from a pretty good financial background to do swim seriously, so that’s a huge reason you see so few people of color,” she said. “But diversity in the pool is so important.”
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At Stuyvesant, the city’s most competitive public high school, where Hispanic students are also vastly underrepresented, students call herKrystal the Pistol. She has compiled a long list of school swimming records. Besides the backstroke, her specialty, Krystal also excels at the butterfly and hopes to qualify for Olympic trials in that stroke as well.
On dry land, her résumé is no less impressive: She is an honor student with an above-90 average, and a saxophone player in the school’s symphonic band. In the fall, she accepted a scholarship offer from Northwestern University, where she plans to study toward a career in sports medicine.
With a full slate of classes (including three Advanced Placement courses) and six days of training a week, Krystal manages her minutes with the brutal efficiency of a Fortune 500 C.E.O. She often wakes up as early as 4:30 a.m. for practice, finishes much of her homework on the bus and train, and sleeps on the floor during free periods at school. “I hate procrastinating,” she said. “Being in the water relaxes me and keeps me focused.”
On a painfully early Sunday morning in March — undeterred by a looming test in Spanish literature — Krystal took to the pool at Asphalt Green on the Upper East Side for some laps. She has been training for more than three years with AGUA, one of the city’s premier swim teams, at Asphalt Green, on a scholarship from the organization that covers lesson costs as well as travel and registration fees for races.
Most weeks, Krystal swims as many as 80,000 meters (about 50 miles), in addition to spending several hours in the weight room. Her routine abates only in the days leading up to a competition.
This particular practice began with a mundane series of warm-ups and technical drills. Once those were finished, the group’s coach, David Rodriguez, 32, gave a firm clap and gathered his team. “All right, all right,” he announced. “Now the fireworks start.”
Within moments, the swimmers took turns mounting their starting blocks and racing one another in trios. Boys were typically matched with boys, and girls with girls. For Krystal, exceptions were made. Wholly unfazed, she won each of her contests with time to spare. As she competed, the room echoed with cheers and insults inspired enough to send a jolt through the adjacent “Advanced Water Babies” class.
“I can’t say it doesn’t feel good to beat the boys,” she confessed. “It puts them in their place a bit.”
As the Olympic trials approach, she is maintaining tempered expectations. Though her times will need to improve if she is to compete for the United States in Rio de Janeiro, she is already well positioned to make the Colombian team (for which she is eligible through her mother).
In the two months before the trials, there are miles more to swim. Many of her teammates had already left the pool, but Krystal remained for a few more laps of backstroke. The water refracted sunlight throughout the arena, and she had nowhere to look but up.
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