At the age of 13, Munroe Bergdorf was a swimming sensation. But in her memoir, she barely devotes a sentence to her feats in the pool, merely saying she swam at national level, was ranked 11th in the country and didn’t have her heart in it. That’s all. She doesn’t tell us whether she enjoyed swimming, trained hard or dreamed of competing in the Olympics. Not even her stroke of choice or distance. Now I’m curious. Fancy being so brilliant at something yet so indifferent to it that it barely merits a mention in your life story.
So I ask, and it all pours out. She swam the 50m backstroke, won race after race for her all-boys school, and hated every minute of it. Not the swimming (that was fine), but the culture. “Going to meets, the boys would all have fun together on the bus and I’d sit at the back,” she says. “I was never part of the squad. I was just there to bring the average of the team up. All of my teammates hated me.” It says so much about how she viewed the world, and how the world viewed her.
