How Cullen Jones turned a near-death experience into Olympic gold and a lifetime of community advocacy

Home / How Cullen Jones turned a near-death experience into Olympic gold and a lifetime of community advocacy

When Cullen Jones was 5 years old, he nearly drowned.

He was at a water park with his parents, and his father suggested they go on the biggest ride there. Jones was excited, fearless, and his answer was a resounding yes.

His mother was nervous. Jones didn’t know how to swim. But the ride involved going down a slide in a massive inner tube. Jones would be tucked safely inside. There was a lifeguard on duty. And Jones was tall enough to make the height limit. She begrudgingly gave the all-clear.

His father went down the slide first, with Jones right behind him. But when the younger Jones hit the water, the inner tube flipped over, and he was caught beneath it.

At 5 years old, Jones was too small to lift it, and he ended up under water for a full 30 seconds before the lifeguard pulled him out. He had to be resuscitated at the side of the pool — he could have suffered brain damage, but he didn’t — and he still recalls waking up and staring into the faces of his mother and father. His first question: “What are we going to ride next?”

His mother had a slightly different reaction.

“My mom was like, ‘No, this is never going to happen again,’” Jones recalled.

It didn’t.

Jones’ parents put him in swimming lessons and went through five different coaches until they found one who motivated Jones to learn to swim. Two decades later, Jones was a four-time Olympic medalist and the first African American to capture a world record in swimming. Then, when he retired, Jones became the face of the most successful water safety program in America, the U.S. Swimming Foundation, working to make sure children across the country could learn how to swim.

“I believe that things come full circle, and my life has literally been the epitome of that,” said Jones said, now the development manager for Novant Health Charlotte Orthopedic Hospital, Novant Health Matthews Medical Center and Novant Health Mint Hill Medical Center.

That’s not to say all of that was easy. Jones wasn’t a natural swimmer. He had to work at it. On top of that, swimming is widely viewed as a white sport. Jones is black. Most of the kids in his hometown of Irvington, N.J., were black or Latino. They played basketball and football. They ran track. They didn’t swim.

But there was something about swimming Jones couldn’t shake.

“With swimming, if I put all of my effort in, I was seeing results. It was harder for me, but I saw the upside to it,” he said.

Jones swam throughout high school and then joined the team at NC State. He was always good, but it wasn’t until he was 21 that someone suggested he could make the Olympic team.

“Honestly, growing up, the Olympics was something I watched, but it wasn’t something that I could do. I was just a kid from Irvington, N.J. I just liked racing. I liked beating the person next to me,” Jones recalled. “But I immediately embraced that dream as if I’d been thinking about that all of my life.”

Then, at a swim meet in 2006, Jones ended up in the pool alongside Michael Phelps, who by that time had already competed in the 2000 and 2004 Olympic games.

“Michael beat me by 1/10^th of a second, and he looked at me and said, ‘Finally, we have our fourth guy for the relay,’” Jones recalled. “At that moment, Michael actually put me into another stratosphere of training. That year, at Pan Pacific Championships, I became the first African American to have a world record and the fastest man in the world in the 50 freestyle.”

At the 2008 Olympic games, Jones joined Phelps on the relay team that won gold and held the world record for 11 years. He came home a hero. But he had a nagging desire to win gold for himself.

Yet again, it wasn’t going to be easy. There were new distractions to contend with — talk shows and interviews, a new celebrity status. On more than one occasion, training came second. And it started to show.

“In 2011, I swam awful. My mom came to me later and said, ‘That might have been the worst swim I’ve ever seen you do.’ She was always my biggest cheerleader, and she said, ‘Cullen, you’re not going to disrespect the Jones name by swimming like that. If you’re going to do it, you’re going to do it right,’” Jones recalled.

He got back to training. He prepared. And it worked. He won gold at the 2012 Olympics, along with two silvers. It was his most successful meet, ever.

“The closer I get to what Novant Health is and what Novant Health does, the more I realize how many great things are happening,” Jones said. “It’s important to continue raising money so we can continue doing what we do for the community.”

Cullen Jones

These days, Jones is retired, although he still teaches swimming. He’s a first-time dad, to a 7-month-old little boy. And he’s working to share the story of the good work that happens at Novant Health, which he refers to as “the hospital in Charlotte.”

That, too, represents a full-circle journey. The first time Jones moved to Charlotte was back in 2008, two months before his first Olympics. He was here to train and swam every day in a pool Uptown, where the walls were plastered with the name Novant Health. Every time, he came out of the water, he saw that name.

“It was trained into my head as I swam by it every day at practice: Novant Health is a brand in Charlotte. When people think ‘hospital’, they think Novant Health,” Jones said. “Now my goal here is to get our story out and show what we’re doing in the community.”

With a focus in orthopedics, Jones has seen people who never thought they’d walk again take new steps. He’s seen people who thought they’d never hold their children again lift their sons and daughters.

“The closer I get to what Novant Health is and what Novant Health does, the more I realize how many great things are happening,” Jones said. “It’s important to continue raising money so we can continue doing what we do for the community.”

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