Road to Paris: Quest for Third Olympics Leads Egypt’s Ali Khalafalla through Oklahoma

Photo Courtesy: Peter H. Bick

Road to Paris: Quest for Third Olympics Leads Egypt’s Ali Khalafalla through Oklahoma

The road to the Olympics takes swimmers from all over the world through the American college system. From far and wide, countries big and small, a litany of colleges can contribute to the 800 or so Olympic swimmers that’ll converge on Paris this summer. In the six months until that happens, we’re going to shine a light on the journeys of some of those swimmers in a new series of stories on The Road To Paris.

Ali Khalafalla was looking for a new place to train in 2021. The home he found might seem unusual.

The Egyptian international had bounced around after his second Olympics in Tokyo that year. He’d stayed at his alma mater, Indiana University, after graduating in 2018, then followed sprint coach Coley Stickels to Alabama. During the COVID-19 pandemic and the Olympic postponement, he was back in Bloomington briefly, then spent nine months in his home country.

Wanting to mount a charge at another Olympics, Khalafalla sought stability. So he reached out to the first coach he’d had in high school, Chris VanSlooten, then at Fork Union Military Academy in Virginia. VanSlooten had relocated to Oklahoma, where he helped Khalafalla make introductions to the Division II program at Oklahoma Christian in Edmund, overseen by long-time coach and American Olympic gold medalist Josh Davis.

Three years later, the 27-year-old is settled, progressing toward the next chapter of his swim career and making headway on life after sports.

“It’s been a good adjustment, going about life changes and life takes different forms that come up,” Khalafalla said recently. “Things have been changing, but it’s been good.”

The journey has been long for the sprinter, who left his native Cairo in 2011. He’s spent more than a decade in the U.S., in Virginia and then as a 10-time All-American for the Hoosiers.

He placed 23rd at the Rio Olympics in the 50 free in 2016, after his sophomore season in Bloomington, tying a national record in the process. Five years later, he was 24th in the 50 and 30th in the 100 in Tokyo.

Since, Khalafalla has made a common decision for late-career sprinters to narrow his focus on the 50 free. He worked first with Noah Yanchulis, now at Cal, and is currently tailoring a hyper-specific sprint program with assistants Trevor Loomis and Patrick Waggoner. Having the OC team to train with provides company, even if he trains a little differently in his late 20s than late teens do.

“Swimming alongside the team and having some sprinters swim with me has been good, but it’s been a lot more tailored toward the 50 free,” he said. “That’s been really, really helpful because I’ve never done that before. I’ve always done a lot of aerobic (work), a little more mid-sprint, long distance than usual, but now it’s all in for the 50 free.”

Khalafalla is on track for Paris. He had a strong meet at the TYR Pro Swim Series stop in Knoxville in January. He chatted a week before departing for the African Games in Ghana, where he won the 50 free and 50 butterfly. His winning time in the 50 free was 22.02 seconds, a meet record and an Olympic B cut. It’s also quicker than he swam at his first Olympics in 2016, when he went 22.25.

Khalafalla’s focus in Oklahoma extends beyond the pool. He’s gotten engaged, having proposed in the very Oklahoman setting of Tulsa’s Philbrook Museum of Art. He’s followed the familiar path to doing swim camps and clinics. And he’s gotten his real estate license, throwing himself into a career that prizes the local knowledge he’s been accumulating.

He approaches the new challenges with the same resilience and diligence he has long honed in the pool.

“I’ve accepted over the past year and a half that life is not all about swimming,” he said. “If I rely on swimming and make it my identity, the ups and downs are going to be very, very painful. Accepting that I have other passions, other things that I can put my effort into in addition to swimming, however long I’m going to continue swimming, has been really good.”

Khalafalla has persisted long enough to track successive generations of Egyptian swimmers. He came of age with Marwan Elkamash, now 30, and Farida Osman. Khalafalla followed Elkamash at Indiana, the state in which Osman was born before moving back to Egypt. But the younger generation of stars – Virginia Tech’s NCAA champion Youssef Ramadan and Louisville/Notre Dame sprinter Abdelrahman El-Araby – is reinforcing the notion that the older stars weren’t a one-off bit of fortune.

Each of that group’s journeys has unique contours that required untold moments of perseverance. Khalafalla tries to explain that when he returns home to field questions from people who want to get themselves or their kids to where he has gotten.

He hopes his example, in and out of the water, serves to illustrate the complexities of that quest.

“Every time I got back to Egypt and go back to national competitions, the first question I’m always asked is, how do I get my son or daughter to the U.S., or how do I go to train there?,” he said. “It’s the No. 1 question. Because they know based off of five to 10 people that have come to the U.S. in the past few years, they’ve made it and they’ve made it really well. They recognize that there’s something in the water in America that makes Egyptians propel up and do really well.”

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