by Glenn Stout
All the WSA girls, including Trudy and her sisters, were among the crowd that gathered for the Olympic swimming and diving trials held at the Manhattan Beach ocean pool on July 10, 1920, the same pool that served as the home of the WSA during the late spring and summer. In addition to WSA swimmers such as Bleibtrey, Riggin, and the WSA's two other most accomplished swimmers, Charlotte Boyle and Helen Wainwright, the trials also included representatives of Philadelphia's Meadowlark Club, the Detroit Athletic Club, the Multnomah Athletic Club of Portland, Oregon, and several other groups.
It wasn't close. The WSA girls, with their mastery of the American crawl, dominated the contests: Thelda Bleibtrey beat the existing world record in the 100 meters in a trial heat, and then set the record again in the finals, knocking another half second off the mark. Aileen Riggin, now fourteen, and Helen Wainwright, another fourteen-year-old, dominated the diving competition despite the fact that both girls had been diving only a short time. Had the Olympic team been selected on the basis of the trials alone, the entire team could have been created from the roster of WSA swimmers; but for political reasons the AOC selected six girls from the WSA trained by Handley, and six swimmers not connected to the WSA.
Even so, it hardly mattered. With Charlotte Epstein serving as team manager and Handley's old colleague Otto Wahle acting as coach, the WSA swimmers were just as dominant in Antwerp as they had been at Manhattan Beach. Although conditions were horrible—the swimming competition was held in a frigid, silt-filled canal that left the girls shivering—Bleibtrey won the gold medal in both the 100- and 300-meter freestyle, winning the shorter distance in 1 minute 13⅗ seconds, more than three seconds faster than second-place finisher Irene Guest of Detroit. She then won the 300-meter freestyle in 4 minutes 34 seconds, nearly eight seconds better than American Mary Woodbridge and nearly ten seconds faster than any non-American. In the 400-meter relay the American team, paced by Bleibtrey, finished an incredible twenty-nine seconds ahead of runner-up Great Britain. Aileen Riggin, Helen Wainwright, and Helen Meany, all of the WSA, swept the springboard diving competition. As Riggin later recalled, the Americans' advantage was due almost solely to the crawl stroke developed by Handley. "We were the first girls to do it," she said, "and we won everything. That stroke took the world by storm." And in the wake of the Olympics, it also swept up Trudy Ederle.
As the first American women to win a medal at the Olympic Games, when Bleibtrey, Riggin, Wainwright, and the others returned to America they were greeted as heroes. For weeks they attended a steady stream of banquets and luncheons and parades, met politicians and other celebrities, and were even offered work as swimming coaches. To their fellow members of the WSA, like Trudy and her sisters, it was all a bit hard to believe that the girls who they swam alongside in the basement pool were famous. Trudy was particularly close to both Riggin and Wainwright, and she loved hearing their descriptions of the Olympic opening ceremonies, where thousands of white pigeons were released into the air and the swimmers wore white flannel pleated skirts and smart-looking navy blue jackets. Although Trudy had already traveled to Europe when her family visited relatives in Germany, she still hung on every word when Riggin and Wainwright described the nearly two-week trip across the Atlantic, where the swimmers, the only women among the hundreds of male athletes, were the object of constant attention from such well-known athletes as the Hawaiian swimming champ Duke Kahanamoku.
Although Trudy found it hard to imagine that she would ever swim well enough to make the Olympic team, at the same time the message was clear: if a girl was one of the top swimmers in the WSA, she was also one of the best swimmers in the world. For Trudy Ederle, that meant that anything, absolutely anything, was possible.
8. The Channel
THE ENGLISH CHANNEL is like no other body of water in the world.
Only twenty-one miles across at its narrowest point between Cape Gris-Nez (Cape Gray Nose) and Dover, those twenty-one miles can be the most treacherous waters in the world. The reason is the tide, for were it not for the tides, swimming the English Channel would have all the allure of swimming back and forth in a backyard pool for half a day or more in the middle of November. It is the tide that makes swimming the Channel so challenging, and the tide that has made swimming the Channel not only one of the most difficult athletic feats on the face of the earth, but also one of the best known and most romantic, a challenge that, once it takes hold of a swimmer, refuses to let go.
And to understand the tides one must understand the creation of the Channel itself.
The English Channel began in a flood. For eons, since the very first formation of Pangea—the ancient supercontinent that once included virtually the entire land surface of the earth—the land mass that eventually became England was not an island at all. As sea levels went up and down and the mechanics of plate tectonics alternately split continents apart and drove them back together, much of the island was alternately exposed and buried and exposed again as if a great tide were rising and falling, shaping it with each wave. Yet England itself remained fixed to the larger continent of Europe, its eastern and southern coasts folded into France.
During one such metaphorical wave about 205 million years ago, the south and east of England were covered by a warm, shallow sea absolutely teeming with microscopic marine life—plankton—that swirled in the currents and tides, rising and falling in the water column until death. Over time these infinitesimal remains inexorably drifted to the bottom of the sea, a slow but steady rain of calcium carbonate, its depth growing by one millimeter per century until the cumulative weight and pressure fused the remains together into a single massive strata, one that over some thirty-five million years eventually created a seafloor that in places measured more than three hundred meters deep.
The result—built up over those thirty-five million years—was chalk. It can be seen today not only in the white cliffs of Dover that reveal the full dimension of this incessant rain of microscopic life, but just inches beneath the ground in much of the south of England, in northwestern France, and elsewhere in western Europe. Each place there is chalk was once the bottom of the same vast primordial sea.
Then, over time, as ocean levels dropped and this sea began to re-cede, a vast portion of southern England, France, and northern Europe was exposed, a single land mass sandwiched between the North Sea and the northern Atlantic that scientists dubbed "Doggerland." As seas levels rose and fell and rivers carved their way through the chalk and poured into the sea to the north and to the south, England came to resemble a peninsula connected to France and the rest of the European continent by an isthmus, a massive chalk land bridge nearly two hundred meters high, covered by a thin layer of soil, that ran through Dover in England and Calais in France. Known to geologists as the Weald-Artois ridge, flora and fauna alike flowed back and forth across this land bridge without interruption. What lived in England also lived in France.
Then came the ice. Nearly two million years ago, as England drifted northward almost to its present position, the Northern Hemisphere entered an epoch marked by the advance and retreat of ice, periods of cooling that featured glaciation and the subsequent lowering of the sea level, separated by warmer periods in which the glaciers retreated and seas levels rose again. England was affected dramatically by these changes. During warm periods England became a savannah resembling modern-day Africa. When the temperature cooled the savanna turned to tundra, windswept and snow covered. And each time the ice came south it scoured the earth, carving wide, deep channels. In the south of England the ice began to cut into the strata of chalk that bound England to the continent.
Yet England and the European continent still remained joined together until some 450, 000 years ago, by which time early humans had reached both England and northern Europe, advancing and retreating in the wake of the ice. Then, sometime between 450, 000 and 200, 000 years ago as glaciers more than two thousand feet thick retreated, a lake of meltwater, trapped to the north by the retreating glaciers, built up
behind the land bridge between England and France. Each day it grew ever larger and deeper as both the Rhine and the Thames rivers, draining an enormous watershed, combined with meltwater from the glaciers themselves to create a vast lake far larger than any ever seen on the planet before.
The land bridge, some thirty kilometers wide, became, in effect, a dam. To the north the great lake grew ever larger, while south of the bridge, the land now free of ice, the weather turned more temperate and created a mixture of grasslands, forests, marshes, and lakes. Fed by the Somme and the Seine rivers, a damp but fertile delta plain emptied into the North Atlantic. Great herds of game and vast numbers of birds and other animals took advantage of the natural bounty, as did small bands of men and women.
Had the great lake, hundreds of miles wide and far, far larger than any lake that exists on earth today, continued to fill, and had the glaciers not retreated so quickly, the lake may eventually have slowly breached the ridge, spilling over it first in a trickle and then, over time, eventually wearing down a channel and creating a massive waterfall and a river running southward, slowly draining the lake until the retreating glaciers finally created an outlet to the north that then would have allowed the waters to escape into the North Sea.
But this is not what happened. For reasons that are still not entirely clear, the land bridge between France and England suffered a massive, catastrophic failure, perhaps caused by an earthquake or other tectonic event.
In an instant, billions and billions of gallons of water, water that had rested placidly in the lake for thousands of years, began to move.
Those billions of gallons, which had long pressed upon the land bridge from the north, burst through in an act of watery violence the world had never before seen. The equivalent of one hundred Mississippi Rivers poured through the breach as up to one million cubic meters of water per second roared down into the valley and then into the North Atlantic. Water and earth were sent downstream in an unimaginable torrent, a cataclysmic event that plowed and scoured and carved away at the surface of the lowlands, tearing deep into the chalk, carving away the land bridge in huge chunks, as one scientist described it, "like a buzz saw through Styrofoam." In this case the unstoppable force—water—met nothing immoveable. Gigantic sections of earth and rock acted like a bulldozer, while the torrent of water washed away everything before it like so much sand before a fire hose, scouring out a passage to the Atlantic.
And then, in only a few months, it was done. The lake was emptied and the flow of water slowed and then stopped. Now the dimension of the destruction was revealed. Every tree and blade of grass, every European bison, antelope, mammoth, wooly rhinoceros, cave lion, and deer, every member of every vast herd that lived in the valley was gone, swept into the water and washed into the sea, their existence there virtually erased. The land bridge itself was radically diminished, its center carved out in an enormous swath. Where man and animals had once roamed there was now only water. England became an island, separated from the European continent by what we know today as the English Channel, the path of this primordial flood.
England and Europe remained apart for at least the next hundred thousand years, separated by the sea, as the human residents of each place lurched toward civilization oblivious to the other. Then, ever so slowly, summers began to shorten and winter's tentacles reached out once again. The glaciers slowly returned, the sea level dropped, and the sea drained away from the valley to the south. The narrow remnants of the land bridge were exposed once more, tenuously joining England to the continent, and humans and animals and other life filled the valley one more time.
Incredibly, it all happened again. The earth warmed and as the glaciers retreated a second great lake backed up behind the land bridge to the north, growing larger and deeper each day, fed by the Rhine and the Thames, filling with water the great cuts and gouges the glaciers had cut into the earth.
And once again, the land bridge did not hold. For a second time the ground shuddered and lurched and the waters broke through, instantly and catastrophically, in a flood even larger than before, a deluge contemporary scientists believe was the largest flood in history, releasing even more water than before, scouring the Channel floor even deeper, this time creating troughs and gouges in the earth as much as ten kilometers in width and some fifty meters deep, turning the waters of the North Atlantic brown with earth and sediment for months.
For all intents and purposes, England was now an island, as on only a few subsequent occasions has ice caused sea levels to drop far enough to expose the remnant of the land bridge and reconnect England to Europe, and then only briefly. For most of this time England and Europe have been separated by the confluence of the North Sea and the North Atlantic.
The result of these two floods was the English Channel, a great basin through which the ocean waters of the North Sea and the North Atlantic, driven by the tides, meet violently, creating massive and at times thoroughly unpredictable currents that wash back and forth and up and down and to and fro as if in a gigantic bathtub. The result is some of the roughest and most unpredictable waters in the world, waters that are calm one moment and storm tossed the next, often shrouded in fog and driven by winds, waters that for eons isolated Britain from the rest of the world, and left human beings on each side, wondering how to get across.
Every six hours, as the moon orbits the earth, the ocean tides change. In the English Channel, currents powered by the tides speed up, slow down, and then reverse course, and the tide rises and falls. For about an hour and half before the high tide to about four and a half hours after—known as the "flood tide"—the water rushes through the Channel in a northeasterly direction as the waters of the North Atlantic flow toward the North Sea. Then the ebb tide takes over, and the water first slows, then, forming a series of channels in slack water, reverses its course before moving again en masse in the opposite direction, flowing southwesterly as the waters of the North Sea come rushing back in a rough imitation of the primordial flood that shaped the Channel in the first place.
The effect is most pronounced in the Strait of Dover, the narrowest part of the Channel and where the Channel waters, in effect, act something like the water in a river. For as the waters from the North Sea and the North Atlantic move through the narrows between England and France, they are squeezed between both coasts, increasing in speed. At their peak during the flood and ebb tides, the waters of the Channel flow astonishingly fast—as much as four miles per hour.
The intensity of the tide does not remain static but changes as the moon completes its twenty-eight-day orbital cycle around the earth. Every two weeks, when the moon is new or full and the tidal pull strongest, what is called a "spring tide" is in effect. Over the course of one twelve-hour cycle, there is an eighteen-foot difference between high tide and low tide, resulting in an enormous volume of water rushing back and forth. During the spring tide an otherwise stationary object will float some thirteen nautical miles northeastward during the flood tide, then be pushed back to the southeast fifteen nautical miles on the ebb tide. Even during neap tides—when there is a half moon and tides are somewhat weaker—the difference between high water and low water is still nearly ten feet, and a stationary object will still be carried some seven or eight miles in each direction as the tide floods and ebbs.
To this day even experienced mariners using gas- or diesel-powered vessels have a difficult time navigating these treacherous waters. For a Channel swimmer, the problem is exponentially worse. He or she is virtually at the mercy of the tides and wholly dependent upon the accompanying pilot boat to remain on course. The swimmer must simultaneously make use of the tides and at the same time swim through and against them, somehow maintaining a course that, in the end, will take the swimmer perpendicular to and across the direction of the tidal currents. The swimmer must work with the tides, at various points racing with the rush of water back and forth to tack across the Channel in a manner not unlike a sailboat running before the wind, and then take adva
ntage of slack water between tides to gain ground toward the opposite shore before tacking with the tide once more.
As a result the swimmer's route across the Channel is never a straight line. Depending upon the speed of the swimmer and tidal conditions, the path across—if made under sixteen or seventeen hours—much resembles the letter Z, a serpentine course with at least two near-180-degree turns, a route that can add as much as ten or twenty miles to the twenty-one-mile distance the crow flies between Dover and the French coast. But if one swims more slowly and becomes caught in another tidal change, the route becomes even more tangled. Matthew Webb for instance, who took nearly twenty-two hours to make his crossing, made no less than four reverses of direction with the tides—his course resembled two squat Zs stacked on top of each other—and he traveled much farther within the Channel itself, back and forth, than the twenty-one miles across.
That is the reason swimming the Channel is so difficult and the reason so many swimmers have come so close to succeeding only to be turned back, for when the tide turns on an exhausted swimmer, even one only a few hundred yards from completing the swim, he or she often lacks the strength and energy to overcome the changing tidal current and can be carried off, either parallel to shore, or, in some conditions, even backward, back toward where he or she first started, a reversal with a devastating psychological impact. The hardest and most difficult part of the swim is often the final few hundred yards, when the tide combines with exhaustion and the cold to keep the swimmer from shore as surely as if he or she were anchored in place.