Mateo
The water does not care who you were yesterday.
Where it started
Mateo learned to swim in the rivers outside Medellín, racing his cousins to a rock and back. His family moved to Miami when he was ten.
What they wanted
He wanted the Olympics. He swam for Colombia's national team in the 1500 meters and trained twice a day for eight years.
The wall
He missed the qualifying time by under a second. Twice.
The moment it clicked
On a bad morning he swam out past the buoys at Crandon Park with no clock and no lane lines. A group of women from a nearby condo were struggling in the chop, and he spent an hour swimming alongside them, calling out breathing counts. One of them had been scared of the ocean for forty years. He had spent his life racing the water, and what he loved was getting people into it.
The new path
He started a dawn open-water group at Crandon. Five dollars a swim, cash in a coffee can.
The hard part
A storm season wiped out three months of sessions and nearly the whole group.
The breakthrough
The group came back bigger. Two hundred swimmers now cross the bay with him for charity every spring.
Today
Mateo coaches open water off Key Biscayne at sunrise and runs the long crossing every April. The Biscayne shield is what he wears on the boat when he is reading the water for everyone else.
This is Mateo's locked face. Every photo and video of his starts from it, so his look stays the same everywhere his appears.
Camila
Andre
Sofia