Cal's Star Freshman Yamato Okadome Says He Came to the NCAA Because of Japanese Swimming Slump
10/17/2024 01:18 PM
By Braden Keith on SwimSwam
An Instagram post from two months ago written by Cal freshman Yamato Okadomehas become interesting in the wake of his headlining first performance as a collegiate athlete last weekend. In the team’s dual meet against UCSD, Okadome swam 1:52.85 in the 200 breaststroke, which ranks him 2nd in the NCAA this season.
On August 9th, as he was preparing to start his academic and athletic career at Cal, Okadome wrote a lengthy post on his Instagram account in a photo posing with Cal associate head coach David Marsh.
While most athletes explain their college choices with canned notions of ‘family’ and a pursuit of academic and athletic excellence, Okadome dug deeper in his post, explaining his choice as a Japanese swimmer – a country that has robust domestic opportunities for elite swimmers to study and train and therefore has not historically sent many athletes to the NCAA.
In the post, he says that he made the choice in part because Japanese competitive swimming “has been in a slump.” He pointed to results at last year’s World Championships, where Japan managed only one silver medal, a performance they repeated in 2024.
Some negative expressions are included, but I would appreciate it if you would take this as just one person’s opinion and way of thinking, not as criticism.
Also, this is a long article, and I’m not sure if I’ve written it to meet your expectations, but I hope you will read it with that in mind.
The reason I am going to the United States to go to UC Berkeley is to fundamentally strengthen the Japanese competitive swimming world and achieve my ultimate goal in my swimming career, which is to become the world’s best in the 400m IM. In order to achieve this goal, I believe that it is not enough to pursue my own results and become faster, but rather that the overall strengthening of the Japanese competitive swimming world is necessary more broadly. In recent years, the Japanese competitive swimming world has been in a slump, as symbolized by the results of only one silver medal at last year’s World Aquatics Championships in Fukuoka and the Paris Olympics. I believe that the cause is not superficial, such as the timing of the selection meeting or the organizational strength of the team for the match, but a more fundamental problem.
There have been historically very-few Japanese swimmers in the NCAA. Where there have been, they’ve usually been athletes with multiple citizenships, like the Ortiz brothers of the University of Michigan or the Litherland triplets at Georgia, though none chose to represent Japan internationally (Bruno Ortiz swam for Spain).
Among the more prominent examples are 2008 Japanese Olympian Saori Haruguchi, who swam collegiately at Oregon State. She wound up finishing 27th at the Olympics in the 400 IM.
Many of the swimmers who come from Japan to the NCAA come from the St. Mary’s International School in Tokyo. That includes swimmers like the Ortiz brothers, former Michigan swimmer Ryutaro Kamiya, former Princeton standout Josh Brown, current Virginia swimmer Alex Hotta, and a handful of others, both Japanese citizens and ex-pats.
Read the full story on SwimSwam: Cal’s Star Freshman Yamato Okadome Says He Came to the NCAA Because of Japanese Swimming Slump
