A professional swimmer, Sipihwe Baleka, has narrated the superficial circumstances that led to him missing out on living a dream of becoming the first-ever African-American to make it onto the Olympics swimming team of the United States of America.
According to the founder of the Fitness Tracking Program, while making a choice for school, he made a bad one that quite wasn’t as bad because it actually turned out to be a divinely good move.
Speaking with the host of Diaspora Link on GhanaWeb TV, Sipihwe Baleka said that his dream took a different turn when he enrolled at Yale University.
“The historical Black colleges didn’t have so many programs and my goal was to make the Olympics: I wanted to be the first African-American to be on the U.S. swim team and in order to do that, I needed to go somewhere where their programs would allow me to do that.
“I ended up going to Yale University which was a strange decision because it was actually the worst swimming team in the Ivy League and everyone was like you could go anywhere, why didn’t go to a great swimming school? The coach in Yale had a reputation for getting underdogs onto the Olympics swim team,” he said.
Sipihwe Baleka, award-winning weight-loss coach and motivational speaker, added that it took a deep revelation for him to realize that his destiny was set for another path than what he imagined and it was one that was crystal clear.
“So, one reason was because of the coach but the other reason was I had this strange out of body experience by the fact that the ancestors were telling me, this is where you need to go. It happened at the time: it was very vivid, it was very clear, some people might call it revelations. I knew instantly at the moment that I was going to make that decision and it didn’t matter that it was crazy for anyone else, it was crystal clear to me that the ancestors were saying that this is where you needed to go,” he added.
About Siphiwe Baleka
Siphiwe Baleka has been on an amazing life journey. From a state swimming champion at the age of ten, an Olympic hopeful at Yale University, a globe-trotting student of life, a national champion Masters swimmer, Ironman Triathlete and "fittest truck driver in America", a successful personal trainer who The Atlantic called "The Fitness Guru of the Trucking Industry", and now an award-winning weight-loss coach and motivational speaker, Siphiwe Baleka has become a leading figure in the optimal health movement.
You can watch Diaspora Link every Sunday at 5 p.m. GMT (9 a.m. PT/ 12 p.m. ET) exclusively on GhanaWeb TV.
