by Glenn Stout
Few athletes of any kind and of any gender have ever dominated a sport the way Trudy Ederle did from the fall of 1922 through the summer of 1924—she held virtually every imaginable women's world record in swimming at distances that ranged from fifty yards to one mile, losing only twice—each time to teammate Helen Wainwright, and even then she defeated Wainwright in a later rematch. The few records she did not hold were only because she had failed to swim those distances under the particular set of conditions required—such as swimming one hundred yards in a seventyfive-foot pool, as opposed to a sixty- or one-hundred-foot pool—or, as in her Labor Day swim, when race officials had failed to time her.
In male sporting terms she was Tiger Woods, Babe Ruth, Wayne Gretzky, Lance Armstrong, and Michael Phelps all rolled into one, her only possible female equivalents such legends as Babe Didrikson, Annika Sorenstam, and Martina Navratilova. But when one considers that Trudy was as successful swimming sprints as she was long distances, her performance is more impressive than that of any of these other athletes. It was as if the world record holder in the 100-meter sprint was simultaneously the world champion in the quarter mile, mile, and 10, 000-meter steeplechase, and winner of the Boston Marathon, and that most of those marks had been set in the same race.
Under the tutelage of Louis Handley, using and perfecting the American crawl, for nearly two years Trudy Ederle hardly knew how to lose. The only thing that stopped her was the ice—she wasn't quite as good swimming indoors in the winter, which sometimes gave her opponents a slim chance at victory; but outdoors in the open ocean she played the sleek porpoise to their meandering turtle.
When Trudy's parents returned to New York from their extended visit to Germany just a few weeks after her Labor Day victory, they discovered that their daughter was a star.
They were not completely surprised by her accomplishments, for they had been kept informed of her remarkable performances by letters and cables and were aware of the notoriety she had gained. Still, it was not until they returned to New York that they realized just what that meant and how much their lives—and hers—had changed. In only a few short months she had gone from a complete unknown to a young woman many New Yorkers now felt that they knew—and cared about.
She didn't just belong to her family anymore, but also to the WSA, to the women and young girls who looked up to her as an example of what a woman could achieve, and to all New Yorkers, who loved to tout the accomplishments of their own. In her own neighborhood Trudy was a star, and the Ederles' retail butcher shop became an impromptu salon for neighbors to discuss her accomplishments and find out when she was competing next. Elsewhere in New York, when Trudy walked down the street, strangers started to point and whisper.
In an era in which the very notion of being a celebrity was still newly minted, Trudy was one of the first. America had never really had a female athletic hero before. Other WSA swimmers, like Thelda Bleibtrey, had their careers end just as they began to reach success, and tennis champ Helen Wills, who would soon become the women's national champion, was still a schoolgirl. French tennis star Suzann Lenglen, although wildly popular in France, was little known in the United States. Women had yet to compete in track and field, and other sports that later came to be identified with female athletes, such as figure skating, as yet had little popular appeal or public profile.
There was only Trudy. Never again would her life be hers alone. At a time when most other girls her age were still in school, Trudy, for all intents and purposes, was now a full-time swimmer. Although she still detested indoor work, by now the WSA had secured a pool in Manhattan, on Fifty-fifth Street, and she no longer had to make the long jaunt to Brooklyn just to practice.
Significantly, Ederle had the full support of her family. Her father, in particular, burst with pride at his daughter's accomplishments and accompanied her to nearly every meet. Since she had already stopped going to school and the Ederles were well off, there was no pressure on Trudy to work or otherwise support the family apart from her household chores. Nothing stood in the way of her swimming career. She turned her life over to the WSA, to Charlotte Epstein and Lou Handley.
But everyone wanted her. The British Amateur Swimming Association extended an invitation to the WSA to send a team to Bermuda in October 1922 to participate in a water carnival in the new natatorium at the Hotel St. George, but the invitation was just a veiled excuse to get a look at Trudy Ederle, the girl who had beaten Hilda James so badly. The WSA accepted, and to no surprise Trudy collected another set of records, a performance that earned an invitation from a British promoter who wanted Trudy and Helen Wainwright to tour Europe the following summer and swim in nearly two dozen events all over Europe.
That was the first sign of what would soon become a larger conflict between the WSA and the AAU, both of which were beginning to battle for control over the young swimming star. She was a valuable property in terms of both publicity and real dollars. While the WSA accepted the invitation almost immediately, the AAU withheld approval.
All the while Trudy kept her head down in the water and focused on swimming. With each new victory she seemed to thrive, becoming ever more dedicated as each win built upon the next, and the approval she received from everyone—Meg, Handley, her parents, and other swimmers in the WSA—increased. The Olympics were only two years distant and provided Trudy with a goal beyond the pursuit of records. Now she could swim for the approval of an entire nation.
In 1923 she picked up right where she had left off in 1922. In a year in which Trudy, like a boxer taking on all comers, seemed to set a record every few weeks, one performance stood out from all the others.
Near the end of the summer season, on September 3, she participated in yet another water carnival at the Olympic baths, a sixty-foot pool in Long Beach on Long Island. For once she actually had some competition: Johnny Weissmuller.
Weissmuller, like Trudy, was of German heritage, born in what is now Romania in what was then Austria-Hungary, in 1904. In 1905 he immigrated to the United States with his parents, living first in western Pennsylvania before the family finally settled in Chicago, where his father ran a bar and worked in a brewery and his mother worked as a cook. Weissmuller learned to swim in Lake Michigan, eventually joining the YMCA swim team and becoming a junior champion. At age seventeen he began to work with famed swim coach William Bachrach at the Illinois Athletic Club and in 1921 began to compete in AAU-sanctioned races.
He was, in many ways, the male swimming equivalent of Trudy Ederle, with one exception: Weissmuller, from the time he first started swimming competitively as a young boy, never, ever lost a freestyle race, not even once. He explained his success nonchalantly, saying, "I could make good time because I was so long and skinny, shooting through the water like a stick," but his physical skills were matched by unparalleled determination and a competitive instinct that refused to admit—or allow—defeat. He burst upon the national scene in the summer of 1922 when he set the men's record in the 100-meter freestyle, and for the next two years he grappled Trudy Ederle for his share of the headlines.
Weissmuller, charismatic and already movie-star handsome, would prove to be of benefit to Trudy's career. He made swimming even more popular and brought even more attention to the sport in the mainstream press, thereby helping to make Trudy Ederle a household name as well. By the summer of 1923 half of America was already gaga over Weissmuller. He'd been ill, and for a time doctors feared heart trouble. They were wrong, but that just made Weissmuller more heroic and more popular.
He was also a cogent observer of Trudy Ederle, once noting, "She has such powerful arms and shoulders that she gets practically ninety-nine percent of her propelling progress out of them—she swims more with her arms and less with her feet than any other swimmer I know...[her] feet are nothing but trailers ... I believe she could swim just as fast with her feet tied together."
Swim meets that featured both Weissmuller and Ederle drew crowds unlike any the sport had ever seen. Young girls an
d women swooned before Weissmuller and looked up to Trudy as a kind of role model. Not until Mark Spitz emerged in the early 1970s did the sport of swimming enjoy such a figure as dominant and charismatic as either Weissmuller or Ederle.
At Long Beach the crowds were enormous. Weissmuller and Ederle were the reason. Weissmuller didn't disappoint—he defeated Ranger Mills, the metropolitan New York one-hundred-yard champion, by more than two seconds in their one-hundred-yard race. But it was Trudy who won the battle of the headlines.
Hers was a five-hundred-yard handicap event against two other WSA swimmers, Virginia Whitenack and Ethel McGary. Both were accomplished—Whitenack, one of the WSA's up and coming stars, was the metropolitan champion over 880 yards, while McGary held a variety of titles from 100 to 500 yards and earlier in the week had won the national AAU long-distance championship, a three-mile race in which Trudy, now focusing on shorter events in advance of the Olympics, had not competed.
Nevertheless, when racing against Trudy, each girl was provided with a head start in a handicap race. Whitenack received a fourteensecond lead and McGary a nine-second jump. By the time Trudy entered the water, Whitenack had already made the first turn and McGary was in the process of doing so.
It wasn't enough.
Trudy responded with the best single-day performance of her career to date, at least equal to her Labor Day effort in 1922. She set world short-pool records at every imaginable distance officials had thought to time—200 yards, 220 yards, 300 yards, 300 meters, 400 yards, 440 yards, and 500 yards, lowering the record over 500 yards by nearly three seconds, finishing the course in 5 minutes 52 seconds. Moreover, despite giving the other girls a head start, she managed to beat Whitenack by seven yards and McGary by fifteen feet.
It was an absolutely stunning, jaw-dropping performance, made even more so by the apparent ease with which she had swum. The New York Times reporter covering the event described her as swimming "a slow, easy crawl. She seemed to be putting such little effort into it that the crowd was amazed when the times were announced." A month later she traveled to Hawaii to face members of the famed Huimakani Club, a Hawaiian team that some swim observers believed was better than the WSA, and whose top swimmer, Mariechen Wehselau, some believed was even better than Trudy.
Not so. Over a three-day period Trudy broke her own world records in the 100, 200, and 400 meters. She was the most dominant athlete in her sport in the world—no one else, not even Johnny Weissmuller, was even close.
Although some men failed to recognize her abilities, those who did did not bother to hedge their words. At the end of the year Grantland Rice, who had earlier accompanied Trudy and the other WSA swimmers to Bermuda, wrote a syndicated column in which he tried to select "the single greatest competitive achievement of 1923." Rice offered a laundry list of some fifteen accomplishments, ranging from Helen Wills's victory in the American women's tennis championship to golfer Bobby Jones's victory at the U.S. Open, Bill Tilden's fourth consecutive U.S. title in men's singles, and Babe Ruth's two home runs in one World Series game.
But in Rice's estimation no one quite matched Trudy Ederle. "Breaking one record is often a great year's work," he wrote. "Smashing seven in one year is a monumental affair."
16. Agony
THERE WAS NO PLACE like Paris.
As the 1924 Olympics approached, the French government and the IOC were determined to show the world that Europe was on the move and had rebounded from years of wanton carnage. Later romanticized by expatriate American writers such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein, in the 1920s Paris was the most exotic city in the world, in Hemingway's terms "a moveable feast," a place where culture flourished, where the jazz was hot, wine flowed, and talk of art and literature filled the air. The Olympics promised to be yet one more beacon for the City of Light, and after the dismal conditions that plagued the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, where swimmers and divers competed in a murky canal full of fetid water of dubious origin, the French pulled out all the stops to make the 1924 Olympics a celebration not only of France and French culture, but of the world itself.
After her stellar performance in 1923, all that remained for Trudy to accomplish in her sport was to earn a place on the Olympic team and then win the expected gold medals. She spent the winter training in Miami with Helen Wainwright, Aileen Riggin, and other WSA stars and then embarked on an abbreviated indoor schedule that took her to such exotic locales as Omaha, Nebraska, Brookline, Massachusetts, Buffalo, and Chicago, where she continued her streak of spectacular swimming. In April her Olympic prospects achieved another boost when Lou Handley was named the coach of the women's swimming team; Johnny Weissmuller's coach, William Bachrach, was named coach of the men's squad, thus ensuring that the two top American prospects for winning medals would be accompanied by their own personal coaches. As summer approached, Trudy cut back on the number of meets in which she competed in order to focus on the upcoming Olympic trials.
Trudy's place on the team was not a given—despite her multiple world records there was no mechanism to name her to the team unless she qualified at the trials. She still had to earn her place, one of 135 young women from all around the country vying for one of the coveted eighteen spots on the swimming and diving team, plus six alternates, more than three times the number of entrants who competed for a place on the 1920 squad. What she had done in the past didn't matter—now she had to perform.
In early June Trudy and most of the other girls gathered at the site of the trials, the Briarcliff Lodge, a hotel and resort in Briarcliff Manor, New York, in Westchester County, just north of New York City. The resort, which offered to host the trials in exchange for the publicity, featured an outdoor pool. On June 7 and 8 the women would swim a series of trials to determine the makeup of the team for the full compliment of Olympic events open to them: the 400-meter relay, 400-meter freestyle, 200-meter breaststroke, 100-meter freestyle, 100-meter backstroke, and both platform and springboard diving. The Times accurately referred to the group, which included swimmers from as far off as Hawaii, as "the greatest aggregation of girl swimmers ever."
When the Trudy awoke on the morning of June 7, it was raining. Those conditions brought a smile to her eyes, and at breakfast, while other competitors looked glumly out the rain-smeared windows at the downpour, Trudy bubbled with confidence and nervous energy. She loved the rain, absolutely loved it, for over the past few years, beginning with the Day Cup, rain had always been a portent of good fortune, and many of her greatest victories had come during a deluge. Had she been a thoroughbred racehorse she would have been known as a "mudder," one whose performance improved in adverse weather. Both the weather and the outdoor pool in Briarcliff played to her strength.
There was pressure on Trudy to win, and not just because she was expected to. While a top two or three finish was generally thought to be good enough to make the team, one never knew for sure. Funds were tight, and while the trials were being held, the AOC was meeting in New York to discuss Olympic financing. Expenses for the
Trudy, age thirteen, in the Highlands.
(Boston Public Library)
Louis de Breda Handley, swimming coach of the Women's Swimming Association.
The United States Women's Olympic Swim Team, 1924. Trudy Ederle is in the center.
Trudy, age eighteen, 1925, just before making her first attempt to swim the English Channel.
(Boston Public Library)
Trudy Ederle, training to swim the Channel. (Library of Congress)
Trudy Ederle signing her contract with the News-Tribune syndicate, flanked by Dudley Field Malone (left) and her father (standing, right).
Trudy (left), her father, and her sister Meg (right), aboard the Berengaria just before leaving for France, 1926. (Boston Public Library)
Trudy meeting the press before leaving for Europe for her successful attempt.
(Library of Congress)
Aileen Riggin (left) and Helen Wainwright (right) see Trudy off aboard the
Berengaria as she returns to Europe to make her second attempt to swim the
Channel. (Library of Congress)
Thomas William "Bill" Burgess, the second man to swim the Channel, 1909.
This map was prepared before Trudy's crossing and shows what Bill Burgess hoped would be her hourly progress on her route across the English Channel. Incredibly, and despite poor weather, Trudy Ederle managed to stay close to this course until the final hours, when tidal currents forced her to the northeast before she finally struck out for the beach at Kingsdown.
Trudy's famous goggles, now a part of the collection of the Smithsonian Institution.
Trainer Bill Burgess coats Trudy with grease before her successful crossing of the Channel. (New York Historical Society)
Trudy, moments after being reunited with her mother aboard the tug Macom after returning to New York, August 27, 1926.
(Boston Public Library
Crowds surround Trudy during the ticker-tape parade following her return to the United States after conquering the English Channel.
Trudy is lost in the crowd and ticker tape as New York celebrates her achievement.
(Library of Congress)
Trudy's house on Amsterdam Avenue, decorated to welcome her home a few days after her return from her triumphant swim. Police still guard the door to the street.
American team were expected to cost about $350, 000, but the committee had less than $250, 000 in hand and was already $53, 000 in debt to its president, Robert Thompson, who reportedly had paid housing expenses in Paris in advance out of his own pocket. Already the committee was cutting back on the number of athletes it was sending to the games—slashing the fencing team from eighteen to fourteen men, the boxing squad from twenty-five to sixteen, and choosing to create a water polo team from among the men's swim team rather than send a separate squad—and there were rumors of more cuts to come. Since women's swimming was a relatively new event, and some members of the AOC still viewed female athletes with disdain, there was a real chance the team might be cut to the bone. Even a second-place finish at the trial might not secure passage to Paris.