Science Rules! with Bill Nye · Stitcher & Bill Nye

Meet the Olympic Swimmer Making Ripples Out of the Pool

·44 min·4 clips

Simone Manuel explains how slave owners created monsters in the water to prevent escapes.

Science Rules is Bill Nye's call-in science podcast, co-hosted by science writer and editor Corey Powell. Corey opens by confessing he never learned to swim as a child — his parents concluded he was a sinker and gave up — and only learned as an adult before becoming a parent, which gives the episode a personal framing. The guest is Simone Manuel, the first Black American woman to win an individual Olympic gold medal in swimming, who took two golds and two silvers at the 2016 Rio Games in the freestyle sprint events. Manuel is from Houston, Texas, where she began swimming at four years old — bath time was her favourite, and her parents wanted all three of their children to swim safely in the summer heat. She swam across the pool on her second day of lessons. Bill and Corey discuss the terminology: he still calls it the crawl, while the sport now calls it freestyle, noting that the crawl motion describes the way elbows and knees move in a crawl-like pattern. Manuel explains that most beginners learn breaststroke first because freestyle breathing is counterintuitive — the head-turn during the stroke is hard to time. The episode covers the biomechanics of elite sprint swimming: the importance of body rotation, bilateral breathing, flip turns, the physics of drag and propulsion in water. Manuel also speaks to being an Olympic swimmer who has become a visible role model for Black participation in aquatic sports, a topic she addresses with characteristic directness. The episode is formatted as a science conversation with personal storytelling from the athlete's perspective.

As heard by us

A swimmer's training becomes a clear, grounded look at technique, adaptation, and the science of speed.

Bill Nye and Corey S. Powell shape this into a clean, grounded look at swimmer training, where technique, body differences, and personal style all matter.

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Want a science-meets-swimming conversation that gets specific fast?

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