Swimming: Freshman Medhat enjoys success nearly 6,000 miles from home

It’s not every day you encounter someone on Pitt’s campus who can say he’s tired of seeing… It’s not every day you encounter someone on Pitt’s campus who can say he’s tired of seeing the Egyptian pyramids in person.

“I see them a lot, it’s not that interesting anymore.”

Then again, there aren’t many swimmers from Cairo as fast as Pitt freshman Hussein Medhat either, let alone ones who enjoy reading Plato in their free time.

In a drastic switch of addresses, cultures and continents, Medhat finds himself nearly 6,000 miles from home and is enjoying early success in his first season at Pitt.

In his first collegiate meet, Medhat won the 100 and 200 freestyle events with times of 47.40 and 1:43.05, respectively.

But he wouldn’t have ever come to Pitt if it weren’t for a friend and classmate at Fork Union Military Academy in Virginia, where Medhat transferred his senior year of high school.

“One of my friends was visiting here, and he asked me to come,” Medhat said. “He told me the people were nice and the coaches were nice, so I said I would come give it a look.”

After the visit, the decision to come to Pitt wasn’t difficult.

“I got to spend a lot of time with the coaches and team captains, and basically I fell in love with the school,” Medhat said. “It was one of the easier decisions.”

But while the decision was easy, being separated from home by a 20-hour, $1000 plane ride does have its disadvantages.

“Egypt is different. I’ve been to a couple countries, but it’s different,” Medhat said. “You can get Egyptians out of Egypt, but you can never get the Egypt out of an Egyptian. The country itself, you always miss it when you’re away, and you go back and you say, ‘Holy cow, what did I do?’”

He also said he misses the humor in Egypt, where, as he said “it’s mostly about making fun of people, it’s not like the U.S. humor that’s mainly about sex and alcohol.”

Medhat hopes to see more countries during his lifetime. He hopes to become a diplomat and travel the world working for women’s rights and poverty.

He’s a philosophy major, but he hopes to go to law school.

Medhat began thinking about coming to the United States for swimming during his senior year of high school. His senior year was the equivalent of a U.S. student’s junior year, as Egyptian high school lasts only three years.

He talked with coaches in the U.S. and received offers from Louisiana State University and the University of New Orleans to swim at the collegiate level. But instead, he ended up coming to the U.S. for a final year of high school.

“My parents decided that I should stay another year in high school,” Medhat said. “My option was either go to a boarding school and try to get financial aid, or go rent a place and stay on my own.”

That’s when he found Fork Union Military Academy, through the same friend who would bring him to Pitt. He enrolled, swam and learned life in the military is quite different than anything else.

The toughest part were the weeks in the beginning of the school year when he was banned from contacting anyone outside the school. But he kept swimming well.

It caught the attention of one of Pitt’s assistant coaches, Aaron Workman.

Workman, a native of Dublin, Va., spoke with the Fork Union coach about Medhat and his friend.

“It was quick. I talked to [Medhat] for a couple weeks. He visited, and he loved it,” Workman said.

Workman noticed Medhat’s speed immediately.

“I looked at Virginia high school results, and his times put him in a pretty good position,” Workman said. “He would come in as a point scorer in the 100 and 200 free. Automatically, he was going to be an asset.”

Along with the skills Medhat brings to Pitt, Workman thinks that he still needs work on his form.

“I did research, saw some videos of him swimming [and] it wasn’t necessarily the prettiest,” Workman said. “Over the water is completely aesthetic, under the water, he does everything right. There are swimmers who do things right, and you can see they have the potential to swim well, then there are guys who put up times, and you know that he knows what he’s doing.”

Medhat would fall into the latter category.

Now that Pitt has full control over his training regimen, the coaches have focused on developing Medhat’s fundamentals.

“We are trying to clean up his technique a bit to make him more efficient,” Pitt assistant coach Jeff Berghoff said. “He does a great job with his arms and tempo, but he’s certainly deficient in his legs. We do a lot of kicking with him, a lot of aerobic work with him.”

But what helps Medhat is his work ethic.

“He’s a laser. He hears that start beep, and he goes,” Berghoff said. “He loves to race. It’s his best attribute.”

While Medhat loves to race, there is one thing about swimming he’s not too fond of.

“To this day, I hate getting wet. It’s the hardest part,” Medhat said. “Many times I would get ready, with my suit on and everything, and come out and just look at the pool and say, ‘Eh, I don’t feel like getting wet today,’ and I’d just leave. Especially if the water is cold.”