By
There are easier ways to get from England to France. Pouleth Estefanía Carbajal Cuero chose the one that begins in the dark and requires more than 14 hours in open water.
The 24-year-old swimmer from Manzanillo, Colima, completed a solo crossing of the English Channel on Sunday, Aug. 16. The Channel Swimming & Piloting Federation lists Carbajal’s swim at 14 hours, 7 minutes, with Paul Foreman and Jason Parrott aboard the escort boat Optimist. The swim remained subject to formal ratification at the time of reporting.
Carbajal entered the water at 2:12 a.m. from Shakespeare Beach near Dover and finished near Wissant, France. Mexican reports put her route at 65.3 kilometers—about 40.6 miles—as tides and currents carried her far beyond the Channel’s roughly 21-mile width at its narrowest point.
That distance is worth sitting with.
A marathon is 26.2 miles. Carbajal swam roughly a marathon and a half, without a wall to push off, a lane line to follow, or a crowd lining the course. Under standard Channel rules, wetsuits, fins, and other equipment that can aid speed, buoyancy, heat retention, or endurance are prohibited. Swimmers also cannot touch the escort boat during the crossing.
That is what makes Channel swimming such an odd and compelling corner of sports—no stadium, no scoreboard, and usually no television audience. The opponent is part distance, part cold, part current and, after enough hours, probably part conversation with yourself.
Carbajal also carried a distinction home to Mexico: She became the first person from Colima to complete a solo English Channel crossing. A year earlier, she had been part of a Mexican relay that crossed the Channel in 11 hours, 21 minutes. This time, she swam it from shore to shore.
She was not the first Mexican woman to make the crossing. Mexico has a substantial history in Channel swimming, including Nora Toledano, who first crossed in 1992 and later became the first Latin American woman to complete a two-way English Channel swim.
But being first from somewhere still means something.
Manzanillo sits on Mexico’s Pacific coast, where Carbajal trained for the challenge. She took that relationship with the water to one of open-water swimming’s most famous proving grounds and stayed in it until she reached another country.
No judging panel had to like her style. No tiebreaker was required. The question was brutally simple: Can you get from this shore to that one?
For 14 hours and 7 minutes, Carbajal kept answering yes.
