Simone Manuel is one of the country's best female athletes. Learn about her childhood, the challenges she has overcome, and this swimmer's greatest accomplishments. Get the inside scoop on gold-medal-winning Olympic appearance.

Inside the Heart of Every Champion Lies Character Winning at sports and life takes more than just talent and hard work. It takes faith, courage, and above all, character. Celebrate the qualities that turn today's top athletes into role models in this inspiring collection of sports stories. Each story showcases a different athlete and explores one key character trait that has distinguished their successful career. Learn more about the superstars of sport, such as NBA All-Star Stephen Curry, Olympic gold-medalist Simone Manuel, NFL Super Bowl champion Russell Wilson, and many more! Champions aren't born. They are made by living with integrity and purpose. You can be a champion in life too!

This title introduces readers to Simone Manuel, providing exciting details about her life and going deep inside the key moments of her swimming career. The title also features informative "fast facts," a timeline, and a glossary. SportsZone is an imprint of Abdo Publishing Company.

Sport has always been central to the movements of both the nation-state and the people who resist that nation-state. Think of the Roman Colosseum, Jesse Owens’s four gold-medal victories in the 1936 Nazi Olympics, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s protest at the 1968 Olympics, and the fallout Colin Kaepernick suffered as a result of his recent protest on the sidelines of an NFL game. Sport is a place where the body and the mind are the most dangerous because they are allowed to be unified as one energy. Bodies Built for Game brings together poems, essays, and stories that challenge our traditional ideas of sport and question the power structures that athletics enforce. What is it that drives us to athletics? What is it that makes us break our own bodies or the bodies of others as we root for these unnatural and performed victories? Featuring contributions from a diverse group of writers, including Hanif Abdurraqib, Fatimah Asghar, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Louise Erdrich, Toni Jensen, Ada Limón, Tommy Orange, Claudia Rankine, Danez Smith, and Maya Washington, this book challenges America by questioning its games.

What does it take to become a champion? Gold medalist Missy Franklin, along with her parents, D.A. and Dick, tell the inspirational and heartwarming story of how Missy became both a legendary athlete and a happy and confident woman, something they accomplished by doing things their own way and making the right choices for their family. The word relentless has many meanings for swimmer Missy Franklin. In the pool, it reminds her to remain steady and persistent, unyielding in intensity and strength. In life, it tells her to reach down for her very best, even when it feels like there’s nothing left. The motto “don’t quit” doesn’t do it for Missy, but relentless gets her where she needs to be. And when Missy faces a challenge or a setback, her relentless spirit is what empowers her to learn, adapt, and move forward into the future. In Relentless Spirit, Missy and her parents, D.A. and Dick Franklin, share the story of how Missy became the athlete she is today, a six-time Olympic medalist, five of them gold. Since her Olympic debut in London’s 2012 games—when Missy was just seventeen—people who have met the Franklins or seen them on TV have wondered what it was like to raise such a champion. What was the training like? How did Missy handle school? How did the family find the right facilities, coaches, and support network? The story that Missy, and her parents, share inside is both inspiring and heartwarming, explaining how she became both a legendary athlete and a happy and confident woman, something they accomplished by doing things their own way and making the right choices for their family, which includes Missy’s faith journey, something she writes about with inspirational candor. Including the highs, the tough moments, and everything in-between, Relentless Spirit tells the story of a woman—and a family—full of love, heart, faith, and resilience.

ANTHONY L. HALL takes aim at the global events of 2016 with a unique and refreshing perspective. Here are some topics in this twelfth volume of his writings: Hillary Calling Half of Trump’s Supporters a “Basket of Deplorables” “Hillary was only half right ... But the most troubling thing is not how deplorable they are; it’s how willing they are to elect an even more deplorable man as president of the United Sates. The latter is what I find incomprehensible ... unforgivable.” Brexit “The irony seems lost on both sides in this Brexit debate that Britain poses a far greater threat to the EU if it remains. After all, Britain planted the seeds of disintegration years ago, when it began negotiating all kinds of ‘opt-outs’ from EU legislation and treaties.” Brazilians Protesting Cost of Rio Olympics “Brazilians need only point to the poisoned chalice Athens 2004 turned out to be for the Greeks. After all, the debt hangover from those Games not only triggered the EU financial crisis of 2010, but austerity measures to service that debt have many once-proud, middle-class Greeks now living like favela-dwelling Brazilians.” Report on College Coaches Raking in Millions “These salaries only validate my longstanding contention that college coaches are using the free labor of student-athletes to live like plantation owners. The only precedent for this is the Founding Fathers, many of whom were in fact plantation owners, preaching about all men being created equal while owning slaves.” VP-Elect Pence Hailing Trump for Accusing the FBI of Corruption “Nothing could be more foreboding than the willingness of no less an establishmentarian than Pence sacrificing democratic institutions and political norms at the altar of Trump’s ego, affecting that constipated countenance of sincerity as he does so.” J.K. Rowling merchandising Harry Potter like Mickey Mouse “I admired her because she helped millions of kids discover the love of reading. But my admiration waned when she started exploiting that love like a drug dealer exploiting a junkie’s addiction.”

"A memoir from World Champion and Olympic Gold Medalist Katie Ledecky"--

A fascinating, in-depth look at the history of competitive swimming and the people and moments that have defined the sport. From the first modern Olympic Games to the present, Below the Surface: The History of Competitive Swimming covers all the greatest moments, top rivalries, legendary swimmers, and biggest controversies in swimming history. It features athletes like Michael Phelps and Katie Ledecky, who have elevated the sport to an unprecedented level, and individual performances that are groundbreaking and awe-inspiring, such as Australian Fanny Durack becoming the first female Olympic gold medalist in 1912 and Jason Lezak leading the US to a come-from-behind victory in the 400 freestyle relay at the 2008 Olympics. While controversies such as doping and the advent of tech suits have troubled the sport, a new generation of athletes have produced fresh enthusiasm for competitive swimming. Below the Surface offers little-known stories, unique insight, and a detailed history of a great sport with a remarkable past and an exciting future.

Choose a stroke and get paddling through the human history of swimming! From man's first recorded dip into what's now the driest spot on earth to the splashing, sparkling pool party in your backyard, humans have been getting wet for 10,000 years. And for most of modern history, swimming has caused a ripple that touches us all--the heroes and the ordinary folk; the real and the mythic. Splash! dives into Egypt, winds through ancient Greece and Rome, flows mostly underground through the Dark and Middle Ages (at least in Europe), and then reemerges in the wake of the Renaissance before taking its final lap at today's Olympic games. Along the way, it kicks away the idea that swimming is just about moving through water, about speed or great feats of aquatic endurance, and shows you how much more it can be. Its history offers a multi-tiered tour through religion, fashion, architecture, sanitation and public health, colonialism, segregation and integration, sexism, sexiness, guts, glory, and much, much more. Unique and compelling, Splash! sweeps across the whole of humankind's swimming history--and just like jumping into a pool on a hot summer's day, it has fun along the way.

"An essential source on African American athletes and Olympic history.” —Booklist, Starred Review, and Named a Booklist Top 10 Sports Book of 2023 The first book to fully chronicle the struggles and triumphs of African American athletes in the Modern Olympic summer games. In the modern Olympic Games, from 1896 through the present, African American athletes have sought to honor themselves, their race, and their nation on the global stage. But even as these incredible athletes have served to promote visions of racial harmony in the supposedly-apolitical Olympic setting, many have also bravely used the games as a means to bring attention to racial disparities in their country and around the world. In Black Mercuries: African American Athletes, Race, and the Modern Olympic Games, David K. Wiggins, Kevin B. Witherspoon, and Mark Dyreson explore in detail the varied experiences of African American athletes, specifically in the summer games. They examine the lives and careers of such luminaries as Jesse Owens, Rafer Johnson, Wilma Rudolph, Florence Griffith-Joyner, Michael Johnson, and Simone Biles, but also many African American Olympians who have garnered relatively little attention and whose names have largely been lost from historical memory. In recounting the stories of these Black Olympians, Black Mercuries makes clear that their superior athletic skills did not always shield them from the racial tropes and insensitivity spewed by fellow athletes, the media, spectators, and many others. Yet, in part because of the struggles they faced, African American Olympians have been extraordinarily important symbolically throughout Olympic history, serving as role models to future Black athletes and often putting their careers on the line to speak out against enduring racial inequality and discriminatory practices in all walks of life.