Nice Jewish Boy Anthony Ervin Is the Oldest Male Individual Swimming Champion
— Jewish swimmer Anthony Ervin became the oldest Olympic gold medalist in an individual swimming event, at 35 capping a comeback from burnout and drug use in the aftermath of his gold medal at 19.
Ervin edged France’s Florent Manaudou by one one-hundredth of a second in the men’s 50-meter freestyle race Friday night in Rio.
The son of a Jewish mother and a father with black and Native American roots, Ervin won his first Olympic gold medal in the same event in 2000.
“When I touched the wall, I saw a 1. Kind of the absurdity, the surrealness of it all,” Ervin said, according to USA Today. “I smiled and laughed. It just seems so unlikely.”
Ervin, of suburban Los Angeles, won a second gold medal earlier in the week in the men’s 4×100-meter relay.
He had quit swimming in 2003 and, as he details in a memoir published in April (“Chasing Water: Elegy of an Olympian”), spent his 20s experimenting with drugs, playing guitar and teaching the sport in Brooklyn, New York.
RELATED:
2016 Olympics: 7 Jewish American Olympians to watch in Rio
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO