Usually, all the media's attention is on the gold medal winner, but Erica Sullivan grabbed some of the spotlight after coming in second in the inaugural women's 1,500m freestyle.
Sullivan's Silver Medal finish Wednesday was a surprise and the first person to congratulate the Japanese American was celebrated teammate Katie Ledecky, who finished four seconds ahead of Sullivan.
In the press conference following the race, Sullivan's told the journalists, that she was the "epitome of an American person.
“I’m multicultural. I’m queer. I’m a lot of minorities. That’s what America is,” said the Las Vegas resident. “That’s what America is. To me, America is not about being a majority. It’s about having your own start. The American Dream is coming to a country to establish what you want to do with your life.”
She responded to the Japanese reporters in fluent Japanese, the result of many trips to Japan with her mother,, Maco, who watched her daughter's moment from her Las Vegas home with Erica's younger sister, Nina. Her grandfather, Sullivan said, helped design some of the Olympic facilities.
"It's surprising and it's really cool that everything just happened to line up and work out," Sullivan said on NBC's Today show. "My mom would've loved to be here, but she's at home in Vegas cheering us on."
“Just me getting to be on the podium, in Japan, as an Asian American woman and getting to take silver in a historical women’s event for the first time, as someone who likes women and who identifies as gay — it’s so cool,” she said, via the Post. “It’s awesome.”
After qualifying for the Olympics, she said about Japan, “It’s literally my second home and I love it there. I found that in recent years I tend to identify with my Japanese side more than with my American side.”
Sullivan told Swimming World Magazine, “It wasn’t until I got out of high school and I really started to crave my Asian heritage and culture, and I really honed into it. “Luckily I found a community through anime watchers, and I found my own little network that I grew to love.”
To achieve her Olympic dream, Sullivan, 20, had to overcome anxiety, panic attacks, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder in the past few years after her father's death in 2017.
“I’m proud of the mental health barriers that I got through, with my dad dying in 2017 and really hitting a rock bottom in 2018 from the stress of losing a parent at age 16 and having to get over the anxiety, the panic attacks, the depression, the PTSD, all that,” Sullivan told Swimming World Magazine. “I’m so happy that I was able to overcome those.”
"The last five years, I've had a lot of struggles, and I think everyone knows that. It's pretty much (an) open book now," she said in the press conference. "But it feels good to have it all finally pay off, and I really hope I can be like a beacon of hope to anyone who's struggling with mental health or coming out or any minority that they are, to show that there's hope, and honestly me getting to do it here, where half my family is from, means the world."
No comments:
Post a Comment