Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World

by Glenn Stout

  She had one last chance, in the 100-meter freestyle race. Perhaps, she hoped, swimming a shorter distance her tight muscles might not prove to be as much of an impediment as they had been over four hundred meters.

  Once again, Trudy easily made it through the preliminary heats and into the finals, as all three American swimmers, Trudy and teammates Mariechen Wehselau of Hawaii and Ethel Lackie, broke the world record in the preliminaries as each girl pushed the other to her best performance. Trudy drew the favored lane three for the finals, and a second gold medal appeared in her grasp—this time an individual award. If she could come away with a second gold medal she could still look at her Olympic experience as a success.

  The stands at Les Tourelles were full for the finale, and with all Paris for a backdrop the scene was set for Trudy to end the Olympics on a high note, basking on the victory stand before an adoring crowd of thousands, looking out over Paris, the best female swimmer in the world. At the start she stood poised on the edge of the pool, hands overhead, hoping for a good start.

  But there was something wrong with the scene. The race official who held the starting gun stood directly behind Trudy. Although she could easily hear the report of a gun, she could not do so quite as well as if the starter had been offset slightly to either side, and in any race, particularly one over such a short distance that matched three swimmers of nearly the same ability, each millisecond matters.

  At the sound of the gun the six swimmers leaped into the water. Five made the initial splash simultaneously. One—Trudy—was a heartbeat late. She was the last swimmer into the water and spent the entire race trying to catch up. Usually, it was the other way around.

  She tried to push herself, to send the messages to her muscles that would make her go faster, despite the knots and soreness, but her muscles resisted, and with each stroke she began to tighten up and even panic. For years she had always been able to draw upon reserves of strength and stamina that she seemed to have in abundance, but now, suddenly, all that was gone. Water that had always felt fast and light to her limbs now seemed slow and thick. She was unable to swim automatically, on muscle memory, but had to think, trying to push herself to perform.

  Stroke by stroke she fought on, passing the other swimmers to move into third place behind Ethel Lackie and Mariechen Wehselau, then, as she made her turn for the final leg, she could sense that Wehselau was tiring and, inch by inch, Trudy finally began to gain some ground, closing in a rush.

  Yet just as she drew abreast of the swimmer, with the end of the pool only a few short yards away, Ethel Lackie surged past both swimmers, and the hand of all three Americans touched the end of the pool in rapid succession. Trudy lifted her head and looked imploringly to the official standing above her, but she could see the verdict in his eyes and in the smiles of the other swimmers. She had finished third. That was worth another bronze medal, but Trudy did not feel as if she had won anything. In a matter of only a few seconds Trudy had seen a possible gold medal slip from her neck and disappear beneath the water. For any other athlete, winning three medals would have been a tremendous accomplishment, but for Trudy it was devastating. For the first time since she had won the Day Cup, Trudy had entered the water and, instead of finding peace, had encountered only disappointment.

  She later termed the Olympics "the greatest disappointment of my life," an experience she found so profoundly painful that for the rest of her life she found watching or reading about the Olympics to be a gut-wrenching experience. She identified with the favorites, cheered for them, and prayed for them to meet expectations. "How do they say it?" she later described the experience, "The agony of defeat? When a champion is defeated in the Olympics? I went through that agony every year since. I cry when I watch it. I should have had three golds. I definitely should have."

  Her Olympics were over and so too, perhaps, was her swimming career. The one goal she had kept in her sights had eluded her. Now, at age seventeen, what was there left for her to do?

  17. Comeback

  THE ONLY WRESTLING Trudy did on the return trip aboard the America was with the voice in her own head that kept asking what had gone wrong.

  After her defeat Trudy Ederle initially had precious little time to dwell on her failure. Olympic officials were so worried about leaving young women unoccupied in Paris that after the end of the competition Charlotte Epstein and Louis Handley took the entire team to England, crossing the Channel by boat to swim an exhibition, and then crossing back again to make another appearance in Brussels before returning to Paris for the closing ceremonies and then boarding the America for home.

  For most of her teammates, the return trip was a nonstop party. Without the pressure of competition they acted like tourists on a cruise, and no one had to worry about staying in shape. But Trudy kept to herself, replaying her races over and over in her head, wondering what had gone wrong and what she possibly could have done about it, but she had no answer. Fortunately, although the Olympics had ended with disappointment for her, America hardly noticed. Despite some pre-Olympic fears by some observers that young American athletes were more concerned with "hot" music, bobbed hairdos, and rising hemlines rather than with the raucous cheers that accompanied falling records, the United States had dominated Olympic competition in very nearly every event, leading all countries with a total of 93 medals, one-quarter of the 361 medals awarded at the games, including 45 golds. In team scoring, the United States was just as dominant, winning the overall championship in eight of the twenty sports—track and field, tennis, rowing, wrestling, shooting, boxing, rugby, and, of course, swimming.

  In fact, in the water the United States had been most dominant of all, winning fully 80 percent of all medals, and the women's team failed to win gold in only one event—the 200-meter breaststroke. As the Literary Digest noted, quoting the Pittsburgh Sun, the victory "indicated that American youth, despite much head shaking and lamentation, is able to hold its own with the youth and stamina of the rest of the world ... It indicates that an age that is commonly said to be going soft is not entirely flabby." As a result, Trudy faced little direct criticism for her personal failure. America had won, so her personal failure was virtually overlooked, but in some ways that was even worse. She had left for Paris as one of the teams' best-known stars but returned as just another competitor.

  But in his official report to the AOC, Louis Handley made it clear that as far as he was concerned Trudy's performance was not her fault, but that of the AOC, the result of its poor planning in regard to transportation and accommodations for the women's team. He went out of the way to single out her experience and excuse her performance, the only individual swimmer he so cited. "I cannot say to what extent the track and field men suffered," he wrote, "but I know the swimmers were affected materially. Miss Gertrude Ederle, our reliance for women's freestyle events, went off form completely."

  The Olympics had also been something of a checkered experience for both Louis Handley and the WSA. Although the WSA girls had performed relatively well, they hadn't been dominant, a fact that was simultaneously both disappointing and gratifying. While Handley and Epstein had certainly hoped that the WSA girls would win more medals, the fact other American swimmers did so well underscored the impact of the group on women's athletics. All over the country other swimming clubs had used the WSA as a model, and Handley's teaching methods were now standard. Everyone else was rapidly catching up with the WSA. The American crawl had not only utterly transformed the sport, but in doing so it was transforming the way society looked at women. They were beginning to be allowed to be athletes.

  Still, for Trudy Ederle life after the Olympics was like diving into a pool and finding out it was filled with only a foot or two of water. For the past two years she had trained and trained hard, but now, with the Olympics over, everyone seemed to be taking a break. Even the WSA had cut back on holding meets and other events. Trudy didn't quite know what to do next. Ever since she had joined the WSA, swimming had been her life, but
now it appeared as if sometime soon her life might have to go on without competitive swimming being a part of it. Now that it was gone she suddenly realized just how much she had enjoyed the limelight.

  In mid-August she traveled to Boston and retained her national title over the half mile, but the field was weak as other big WSA stars, like Helen Wainwright and other Olympians, were still taking time off. For the rest of the fall and into the early winter, Ederle raced only intermittently, and every day it became just a little bit easier for her to decide to put off her training for another day. Already out of shape upon her return, throughout the fall, without the warm and familiar waters of the Highlands calling her out every day, her condition only deteriorated.

  Her swimming career appeared to be slowly winding down. Her WSA teammate Martha Norelius, whose father swam for Sweden at the 1906 Olympics, seemed poised to become the next Gertrude Ederle. At age seventeen, Trudy was not in danger of becoming yesterday's news—in a sense, she already was.

  Purely by accident, Helen Wainwright saved her.

  In the wake of the Olympics Wainwright was looking for another challenge. At age nineteen and already the veteran of two Olympics, she wanted to cap off her amateur career before turning professional and becoming a coach. Likewise, with another Olympic Games nearly four long years in the future, the WSA needed to do something in the interim that would continue to bring publicity, attract donors, and reinforce the notion that the WSA was still the foremost women's athletic club in the nation. Now that the 1924 Olympics were over, and without Trudy Ederle breaking another record every time she jumped in the water, press coverage of the WSA was beginning to drop off.

  The only significant swimming accomplishment in the world open to women not yet dominated by the WSA was the English Channel. For more than a year Wainwright, whom the press started to refer to as Helen "Swimright," had let WSA officials know that she thought she could change that and become the first woman to swim the Channel. Over time she earned the support of both Louis Handley and Charlotte Epstein. Handley, in particular, thought it a worthy idea. He had long pondered the challenge posed by the Channel and was eager to test his ideas. After all, no swimmer of either sex had attempted to swim the Channel using the American crawl—the Channel would prove to be the ultimate test of the stroke Handley believed was far superior to any other over any distance. Wainwright, and not Trudy Ederle, had been the WSA's most consistent swimmer over the last six months, equally skilled in both sprints and longer distances, and in the wake of the Olympics she was in top shape. Handley had recently called her "the fastest girl swimmer in the world," an indication that Trudy Ederle, who had once held that title, now did not, not even in the eyes of her own coach. It was a measure of just how far Trudy's star had fallen, for Wainwright, despite all her talent, didn't have nearly as much experience as Trudy in open water.

  In the fall and winter of 1924 and 1925, Epstein began researching precisely what an excursion to swim the Channel would entail, and in January she formally presented the idea before the WSA's board of governors. Clearly and logically she laid out why she thought it was important for the group to support Wainwright and precisely what such an effort would entail—and cost. Using Wainwright's AAU record time of 26 minutes 44⅘ seconds for the one-mile swim as a benchmark, Epstein and Handley told the board they believed that Wainwright could cover the twenty-one miles between England and France in about fourteen hours. By way of comparison the current record holder, Enrique Tirabocchi, who had crossed the Channel in sixteen hours and thirty-three minutes, couldn't swim a mile in less than thirty-five minutes. Epstein and Handley believed that Wainwright might not only succeed, but set a record in the process, shattering the men's mark. If she succeeded, the goals and aims of the WSA would become a worldwide quest, helping the cause of women's equality in every corner of the globe.

  The board found their arguments convincing and authorized Epstein to spend upward of five thousand dollars to make all arrangements for the trial. She planned to accompany Wainwright to England in June, where the swimmer would spend at least a month training and acclimating to conditions. If all went well she would swim the Channel sometime in August.

  Although Trudy had heard that the WSA decided to send Wain wright to Europe and she was hurt and disappointed at being overlooked, part of being a member of the WSA was being a good sport, and Trudy did not complain. In fact, she didn't even learn of the final decision to send Wainwright abroad until Meg, who still looked out for her younger sister and continued to push her forward, told her. She believed that Trudy was just as deserving as Wainwright to take a shot at swimming the Channel and told her younger sister just that. Trudy thought her sister was crazy, but Meg was much more animated—and persuasive—asking her, "Why can't you at least try? How do you know if you don't at least try?" Trudy had to agree, telling her sister, "Well, you have a point there, you know." Now that the seed was planted, the rest was up to Trudy.

  Trudy knew that in her current condition there was no way the WSA could possibly consider sending her to the Channel. But now—for the first time since her victory at the Day Cup—she was being told she wasn't the best, and that bothered her. If she was the best swimmer, well, the Channel would take care of itself. Almost immediately she responded to the challenge and for the first time in more than six months began to show the form that once had made her almost unbeatable.

  All the girls who had passed Trudy by now found Trudy catching up to them again. In late January she clipped one-fifth of a second from her American record over two hundred yards in a sixty-foot pool, then finished second by fifteen yards to teammate Ethel McGary in the 500-yard nationals in a seventy-five-foot pool, a sign that although she was getting stronger she still had room to improve. In St. Augustine, Florida, in early February she began to show signs that her career was not over.

  She finished second in her defense of her title in the 50-yard sprint, but only after the first final trial ended in a dead heat between Trudy and two other swimmers; in a repeat she lost by less than a foot. Twelve days later she knocked one full second off the 150-yard record, tied the world mark over 220 yards, and then, just a few days later, on February 26, broke it by a full two seconds and then broke the 200-yard record the following day. All of a sudden, and entirely unexpectedly, Trudy Ederle was the best swimmer in the world again.

  Meanwhile, it was Helen Wainwright who was slipping—literally. Shortly after defending her national 220-yard title, she lost her footing while getting out of a trolley and tore a muscle in her thigh.

  Trudy was training at the City Athletic Club in New York when Meg heard about Wainwright's unfortunate accident. Meg instantly thought of Trudy and rushed to the club. Trudy was still in the pool when her sister, dressed in street clothes, came rushing in and called out to get Trudy's attention, then waved her over to the end of the pool so they could talk.

  Hardly able to contain herself, in a rush Meg blurted out that Wainwright had slipped and fallen while getting off a streetcar and had hurt her leg and could barely walk not to mention swim and now, isn't it terrible, just horrible, but she wouldn't be able to train, and if she could train she couldn't stay in shape and if she couldn't stay in shape, well, then, certainly, she couldn't possibly to go to England and try to swim the Channel, could she? So...

  "Why don't you go, Trudy?"

  The question hung over the pool for a moment as Trudy tried to process exactly what her sister was getting at. She shook her head. "Margaret," she said, addressing her sister by her formal name to make sure she understood that she was serious, "Are you crazy? I only swim 220 yards," referring to her most recent competitions and conveniently forgetting everything else. "That's the farthest I've ever raced so far. I could never swim across a big body of water like that."

  Meg had heard that kind of talk before. That was her sister, always underestimating herself. Had she forgotten about all those hours at the Highlands? How about the Day Cup? She'd beaten Helen Wainwright by miles
.

  In her best "I'm your big sister and you're going to listen to me so pay attention" kind of voice, Meg knelt down along the edge of the pool and looked her little sister right in the eye, putting her face directly in front of Trudy's so there'd be no question whether or not she could hear her—when she wanted to, Trudy could pretend not to hear with the best of them. "Listen, Trudy," said Meg slowly, enunciating every word. "You are the better swimmer right now," she said with emphasis. "If Helen Wainwright can swim five miles, you can swim six."

  Meg stared down at her sister with a look that said "you know I'm right," and Trudy stared back at her sister and knew she had already lost the argument. Meg was right. Meg was always right, and when Meg was right, well, Trudy knew better than to argue. She shook her head, raised her eyebrows, rolled her eyes, and, letting out a big sigh, said, "Oh, is that all I have to worry about?" Meg refused to look away and then Trudy, smiling faintly and still looking a bit uncertain, said, "Whatever you think ... okay, okay." Then she turned and started to swim again. She had a lot of work to do.

  The press had the same idea as Margaret and soon asked Trudy the same question. "I'm going," she told them, "I'm going." In a matter of days the WSA reached the same conclusion. Although it still hoped that Wainwright might recover and make the trip, Charlotte Epstein approached the board of governors at its monthly meeting in April and asked for authorization to take Trudy to England as well. Adding Trudy to the trip made a great deal of sense, and the added cost was relatively insignificant. The two girls not only could train together, but when it came time to attempt the swim, they could pace each other, and their natural competitiveness was bound to kick in and help each push the other, increasing the chance of success for both. To have two WSA swimmers become the first two women to cross the Channel, and to have both do it on the same day, would be a huge story all over the world.