I grew up swimming with and against Jordan Crooks, and I didn’t think anything would be cooler than watching him win his – and the Cayman Islands’ – first major international gold medal and world title back in 2022.
This last week in Budapest has trumped that.
Repeating as a champion is tough. Defending your crown against the world, when everyone knows your name and has their sights set on taking you down, is a big ask in any sport, let alone one where winning and losing often comes down to fractions of a second.
And while it’s an undeniable fact that someone must win gold in every race, even the reigning victors and podium-topping favourites must back up all the hype when it matters most.
Jordan did.
But a broken world record… that’s far from a guaranteed sight, even if there were quite a few all-time marks toppled across the board at the 2024 World Aquatics Swimming Championships.
Yet Jordan managed that too, with ease. Twice.
In doing so, a young fisherman from Prospect – whose cool, calm demeanour in front of the cameras I’m certain still masks the fearless, carefree spirit that once chased iguanas off the Lions Pool deck – was launched further into international sporting superstardom, becoming, irrefutably, the fastest swimmer in history.
Even more impressively, his new world record shattered a barrier many in the swimming world thought impossible to surpass, as he (comfortably) completed the sport’s marquee sprint event, the 50-metre freestyle, in under 20 seconds to go where no human had gone before.
As young swimmers in Cayman, qualifying for the CARIFTA Championships was always viewed as the first major benchmark for success in the pool. For many of us, it was also the first chance to don Cayman Islands colours and represent our country.
Buoyed first by an enthusiastic new wave of coaches in the early 2010s, life was reinjected back into a sport struggling to find – and keep – its next stars in the post-Fraser brothers’ era. As first measured by CARIFTA performances, Cayman’s success as a nation within the region soon began to skyrocket, as a burgeoning group of dedicated young athletes committed themselves not just to reaching that level but dreaming of what lay beyond.
Among those generations of swimmers – who, in too many instances to list here, have gone on to achieve remarkable success at every level of the sport – was Jordan.
A perennial CARIFTA attendee with a penchant for powerful underwater kicks, the central role he played in Cayman’s record medal haul at his final edition of the regional championships was, looking back, perhaps an early indicator of a bright future as he headed to the University of Tennessee.
But for all Jordan’s successes to that point, I don’t think I do him a disservice to say his trajectory since – which has been nothing short of spectacular – is one which few, if any of us, truly saw coming.
Historic performances began in his very first season as a Vol, with whom he’ll bid for another world record as his collegiate career winds down early next year. Those achievements merely set the stage for that first World Championship gold two years ago.
Twenty-four months later, there will be very few, if any, swimmers around the world who don’t know and marvel at his name and accomplishments.
Yet perhaps most importantly, here is a young Caymanian role model for every swimmer, prospective swimmer or aspirational dreamer within our islands; one who shows you can remain humble even with the world at your feet, and who proves that all those 5am training sessions before school may just pay off in the end.
With a lot of hard work and a little Hurley’s green juice, who knows where you might end up?
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