This article examines the sport of swimming to demonstrate how systems of racial privilege and inequality are built. I use Ben Carrington's (2010) sporting racial project as a tool to understand how race is constructed through sporting practices by examining early-twentieth century texts produced by swimming coaches, physical educators, and sports scientists. Such texts rationalized and standardized swimming techniques and practices within the racialized (and gendered and colonizing) discourses of modern sport science. Early elite practitioners shaped (and continue to shape) swimming and its meanings that inform our everyday understandings of sport and 'race' while constructing Whiteness.