Born: 23 October 1906, United States
Died: 30 November 2003
Country most active: International
Also known as: NA
In 1926, Olympic champion swimmer and world record-holder Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to swim the English Channel.
Ederle won swimming gold at the 1924 Olympic Games, setting a new world record while she was at it. But despite international acclaim and a sponsorship for her attempt to become the first woman to swim the English Channel, her own coach didn’t think she could do it. Although she did fail the first time around in 1925, she not only succeeded the following year but did so faster than any of her male predecessors, in 14 hours and 34 minutes — a record that stood for 25 years. She also did better than her initial coach — who failed in not one, not two, but 21 attempts to swim the Channel from 1906 to 1914. Jabez Wolffe repeatedly tried to slow her pace during training, claiming she would never last at that speed. In fact, her 1925 failure was due to Wolffe ordering another swimmer to pull her from the water, resulting in her attempt being disqualified. According to both Ederle and witnesses, she was not in danger of drowning as Wolffe claimed, but simply floating face-down for a rest. Unsurprisingly, after she dumped him for a different coach (Bill Burgess, who had, incidentally, completed the Channel swim) her results spoke for themselves. Wolffe had previously commented that women may not be capable of swimming the Channel, and it seems entirely possible that he did not want a woman to succeed where he had failed.
Ederle had et her first world record when she was just 12 years old, in the 880-yard freestyle, becoming swimming’s youngest world record holder. She sent on to set eight more, seven of them in 1922 at Brighton Beach while still a teenager. In total, she held 29 US national and world records between 1921 and 1925.
Due to childhood measles, Ederle experienced progressive hearing loss, and was completely deaf by the 1940s; in her later life, she taught swimming to deaf children.
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