Image Is Everything: How Bryan Mineo Transformed Himself into a Swimming Icon
Much has been written on the internet about the swimming prowess of Bryan Mineo, but is it real or merely an internet narrative?
There was an article published on a non-profit I have recently started investigating which has recently caught my attention.
The article was written by Bonnie Tsui for the travel magazine A Far; the title was “One With the Ocean is Fostering Community- and Picking Up Trash.”
That article- which can be called a puff piece- was published on April 19, 2022; only a few days later I came out with my investigaion of OWO, presenting a much different side of OWO and its founder Bryan Mineo.
Mineo would later threaten to sue me.
Tsui has gained some gravitas in the swimming world, particularly after she published the book Why We Swim.
It was featured in the New York Times, the Washington Independent Review, swimming websites, and in other spots.
It was well received, sold well, and thus established Bonnie as a well-known name in the swimming world.
I emailed Tsui and AFAR but neither responded. Here is part of Tsui’s story.
For the nonprofit One With the Ocean (OWO), the world’s largest open-water swim group, it was just another Thursday night "SLOG," or what Mineo, OWO’s founder, described as the swim version of the Swedish fitness trend of "plogging": jogging plus plocka upp (picking up) trash. A random sampling of OWO’s collection this year includes dental floss, cigarette butts, rugs, broken chairs, discarded clothing, sex toys, and countless plastic items—bottle caps, buckets, bags. I looked around at the happy beachgoers bathed in this golden-hour light, seemingly incapable of chucking anything like a dildo or a doughnut wrapper into the sand. But humans will do as humans do, even at the beach.
"So what we try to do," Mineo said cheerfully, "is clean up after them."
As the sun descended over a mercury-hued Pacific, setting the beach’s bluffs aglow, we tumbled out of the water, each of us by turns chatty and euphoric. (Picking up trash on the beach was the focus, but if we saw some in the water, we grabbed it, too.) Mineo, an open-water swim coach, wasn’t swimming that night. From his perch atop a surfboard, he was acting as safety spotter, monitoring the group’s whereabouts, cheering swimmers on, and providing a resting place for anyone who needed it. But he was smiling just the same. Forty-five minutes later, we came away with the flush of exercise, a sense of communal accomplishment, and a dozen inflatable neon swim buoys filled with garbage.
Indeed, Mineo has built a cadre of devoted followers, and he holds open waters swims while also doing beach trash pick up, but there is already at least one dubious claim: when Bonnie referred to OWO as “the world’s largest open water swim group.”
I’m not sure how that is measured but that sounds like something Bryan told her.
They are all over the world- I found dozens in Australia- so what makes his the largest?
Furthermore, while Bonnie described his swims as safe in her article, I interviewed Ella Alderete who told me she nearly drowned when she went on a similar swim organized by Bryan.
Tsui described his organization as having nineteen chapters and 4,000 members, but even this has little meaning.
In his deposition, Bryan described the chapters as independent with little oversight or verification from him.
The deposition was done in late 2021 so OWO may have added chapters since then, but his description is an organization based on the honor system.
Furthermore, all his trash pick up statistics are based on models for how much trash would be picked up based on his inputs.
He hasn’t actually witnessed any of the trash pick up.
That’s not what you would read in Tsui’s article. Instead, it is of a man leading a revolution for open water swimming while keeping the beaches clean.
Each OWO chapter offers a range of training swims, workouts, race events, and beach cleanups. Of all the initiatives, Mineo said, the SLOG swims have been the fastest growing. "We’re running around in Speedos with bright buoys attached. People are watching us and saying, 'What is that?' And every time, there are three or four people asking us how they can help. It’s a visual reminder of a problem that is easy to forget," he said.
Over the ebb and flow of a year, OWO swimmers said they have noticed that summertime produces the most trash, due to the increase in people on the beach. The ironic thing about the mentality around disposability, of course, is that when it comes to the ocean, what you leave behind ends up traveling somewhere else—and may well end up closer to home than you think. With the idea that all paths point to the ocean, OWO also gives each member a recycled beach cleanup bag and tongs and encourages them to do "solo sweeps," cleaning up a mile of local beach, park, or road whenever they have time.
So, what is OWO and Bryan Mineo? The answer is it’s an internet creation like all of us.
It was something Eney Jones, herself a world class swimmer, spoke about when I interviewed her for the podcast.
Bryan, she told me, attached himself to his girlfriend and future wife, who was an elite swimmer and triathlon competitor.
Dear English Channel: You may have met your match. Bryan Mineo is coming after you and your badass conditions, and Bryan Mineo does not like to lose. He is a Dallas swim coach and half of the Mineo Athletics multisport training team, the other half being pro triathlete D’Ann Arthur.
While attached to her, Mineo had the swimming credentials to justify all the publicity he was receiving, but he and his ex-wife broke up years ago.
Mineo swam in high school and picked it up again after meeting Arthur.
Even his most noteworthy claim seems dubious: swimming the English Channel.
He promoted himself everywhere as training to swim the English Channel. Here is part of a local Dallas story.
I've yet to meet Bryan Mineo personally, but I've seen him coaching on several occasions when I've swum at LA Fitness Uptown (a beautiful new club, btw). I didn't know his name until I started talking to one of his students (clients? coach-ees?) in the locker room afterward.
I could tell he was good just by watching how attentive he was as he walked up and down the pool, never taking his eyes off her and the other swimmers I've seen him coach. She confirmed that, raving about him and all he's done to help her recover from hip (or was it knee?) replacement surgery.
Then she told me that Bryan, who is 29, is training to swim the English Channel. Can you even imagine?! I looked it up, and though the distance is 23.68 miles, you apparently end up swimming several more because of the tide. I'm putting on my floaties as I write that.
To prep for the swim, which he hopes to complete a year from September, Bryan's doing the Swim Around Key West -- at 12.5 miles, a little more than half the Channel distance -- on June 8.
He also got a news story in the local NBC affiliate in Dallas.
Everything about Bryan Mineo says, "I'm an athlete."
He has almost no body fat and is committed to a clean, healthy diet.
Mineo, who owns a fitness company and coaches triathletes and swimmers, plans to swim the English Channel next year. He set the goal, a feat commonly referred to as "the Mount Everest of swimming," a few years ago.
The straight-line distance across the channel, the arm of the Atlantic Ocean that separates southern England and northern France, is 21 miles. But swimmers have to swim much farther because of the effects of tides.
The problem: it doesn’t appear as though Bryan ever followed through and actually swam the English Channel.
In 2014, he and his then-wife, a professional triathlete whom he’d married the previous year, moved to California, largely to be near the ocean. But almost immediately after arrival, the marriage fell apart. In the messiness of a divorce, he had to abandon his English Channel quest. He had neither the money, nor the heart. He’d just arrived in the place he’d hoped to be all his life, but he knew almost no one, and for a few months was without a home.
That fact is buried deep inside another puff piece How to be aquatic: Bryan Mineo’s journey from the lakes of Texas to the Pacific Ocean for another leisure magazine.
For my first article, Gerry Rodrigues, the well regarded swimming coach, told me that he caught Mjneo lifting ideas and writing from and others. He complained to the swimming magazines afterwards and most of the articles were released.
Gerry further told me that the effect of bolstering Mineo’s reputation had already occurred.
Today, though he’s only gotten back into swimming in the last decade- and only swam competitively in high school- he’s considered an elite instructor for open water swimming along with helping to keep our beaches clean while teaching kids in the inner city to swim safely. Here is more from Bonnie.
Though the Encinitas sunset swim was my first with OWO, I knew that Mineo had created something special: a group of conservation-minded swimmers who supply the knowledge and meet you where you are. Anybody can join for a swim at any chapter. New attendees are given OWO swim caps and welcomed for a free swim. Membership dues and donations go toward supporting core initiatives, including regular organized swims, more than 600 beach sweeps a year, and Play in the Waves, a program that offers free ocean education and swim lessons to kids in underserved areas.
Post Script:
Check out the previous articles in this series: Article 1, Article 2, and Article 3.
Check out the new fundraiser to help investigate non-profits like OWO.
