Background

Gertrude Caroline Ederle was born in New York City on October 23, 1905. Ederle was the daughter of parents who had recently emigrated from Germany. Her father, Henry Ederle, ran a successful butcher shop and delicatessen on Amsterdam Avenue on the West Side of Manhattan, in New York City. Her mother, Gertrude Anna (Haberstroh) Ederle, was a homemaker. Gertrude was the third of six children.

Education

Gertrude learned to swim on the New Jersey shore at Highlands, where her family vacationed. Ederle's older sister was also a competitive swimmer. Both girls received their swimming instruction at a remarkable institution called the Women's Swimming Association (WSA) of New York, which had been founded in 1917. In its tiny pool on the Lower East Side of the city, the WSA trained several generations of women swimmers who went on to national and Olympic success, including backstroker Eleanor Holm and future Hollywood star Esther Williams. Ederle started serious training when she was thirteen years old. She was guided by the far-sighted coach Louis de Breda Handley, who revolutionized women's swimming by championing the Australian crawl and increasing the leg action to a more powerful eight-beat kick.

Ederle began to excel at swimming just as the sport was emerging as a serious competitive sport for women in the 1920s. She made headlines at the age of sixteen when on August 1, 1922 she won the prestigious three-and-a-half mile Joseph P. Day Cup race in New York Bay. In the race, Ederle defeated the world's top female swimmers, including American Helen Wainwright and British champion Hilda James. Ederle also swam shorter distances, holding eighteen world records at one point in 1924 for distances ranging from fifty yards to one-half mile. Too young for the 1920 Olympics, the first games in which American women competed in swimming, Ederle was an obvious choice for the 1924 team. Hampered by an injury, she won bronze medals in the 100- and 400-yard freestyle as well as a gold medal for the four by 100-yard relay. Ederle's training and travel took priority over her education, and she never graduated from high school.

Career

By 1925, Ederle had decided to turn professional and swim the English Channel. In preparation, on June 15, 1925, she swam 21 miles from New York's Battery to Sandy Hook in New York's Lower Bay, in 7 hours 11 minutes, becoming the first woman to finish that course. That same year, her first attempt at swimming the English Channel failed six miles from the end because of cramping. Ederle did not want to quit, but her coach Jabez Wolffe had her physically removed from the water for fear that she might drown. Critics took this event as confirmation that women were physically inferior to men, while some publications discussed Ederle's strength as a detriment to her femininity, citing experts who held that you could not be a true woman and participate in such strenuous events.

The following year, Ederle's successful swim across the English Channel placed her name in the history books, as the sixth swimmer and first woman ever to accomplish the feat. The first long-distance swimmer to successfully complete the course had been Britain's Matthew Webb in 1875, followed by another Briton, Thomas W. Burgess, in 1911, and by Americans Henry Sullivan and Charles Toth and Argentinean Enrique Tiraboschi in 1923. Ederle's swim from Cape Gris-Nez, France, began in the early morning hours of August 6, 1926, at 7:09 am, with her body greased with lard by her sister Margaret. Almost 15 hours later, at 9:40 pm, when most of England had settled in for the evening, she arrived at Kingsdorn, near Dover. A storm had closed the area to all normal shipping throughout the day, and she had to swim through rain that began in the early afternoon, with increasing winds that made the sea choppy by early evening. Ederle's trainer, father, sister, and others, who were tracking her progress in a tug named the Alsace, tried to get Ederle to stop on at least two occasions, but she refused. In later interviews, she maintained that she finished the swim for her mother, who sent periodic radiograms that were read to her from the boat by her supporters.

Throughout the day, the crew aboard the Alsace also sang patriotic songs, including the National Anthem, to help keep her spirits high. With Burgess, one of the former channel swimmers, serving as her coach, Ederle swam the 30-35 miles in 14 hours 34 minutes, setting a new record and breaking the previous male record by nearly two hours. Her success received front-page coverage throughout the United States, England, France, and Germany.

When Ederle returned to Manhattan, the city gave her a ticker-tape parade that attracted two million spectators. She was flooded with book, movie, and stage offers, as well as proposals for marriage. She embarked on tours of North America and New York that drained her health and led, in 1928, to a nervous breakdown. After suffering a severe back injury in 1933, she was never able to compete again, although she did give swim performances at the "Aquacade" attraction of the 1939 New York World's Fair.

Ederle later taught hearing-impaired children to swim. She developed a special understanding for children with this disability because the prolonged exposure to cold water during her English Channel swim had left her with a hearing loss.

Ederle also appeared in the movie Swim Girl, Swim, starring Bebe Daniels.

Achievements

• Gertrude Ederle was one of the most famous athletes in the world. On August 6, 1926, she became the first woman to swim across the English Channel from France to England, a feat she accomplished in 14 hours 34 minutes. Her time beat the previous men's world record by 1 hour and 59 minutes.
  
  At the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris Ederle was a member of the United States team that won a gold medal in the 4 × 100-metre freestyle relay. She also captured bronze medals in the 100-metre and 400-metre freestyle events.
  
  Gertrude was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame as an "Honor Swimmer" in 1965. She was also inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2003.

Views

Quotations: "The doctors told me my hearing would get worse if I continued swimming, but I loved the water so much, I just couldn't stop."

"To me, the sea is like a person - like a child that I've known a long time. It sounds crazy, I know, but when I swim in the sea I talk to it. I never feel alone when I'm out there."

"Oh, I eat whatever I want whenever I want it."

"Don't weep for me; don't write any sob stories."

"Of course one can't eat in a civilized fashion while touring in theatres. But I still manage to get my three meals a day. I find that is sufficient for training."

"Slowly I came to know that the depth of our heartbreaks determines the depth of our faith. God gives us everything to conquer the big and the little hurts of life."

"When we're in the water, we're not in this world."

"I just knew if it could be done, it had to be done, and I did it."

"I have no complaints. I am comfortable and satisfied. I am not the kind of person who reaches for the moon as long as I have the stars."

"People said women couldn't swim the Channel, but I proved they could."

"When somebody tells me I cannot do something, that's when I do it."

Personality

Gertrude Ederle did not smoke or drink and was not excessively interested in boys, a sharp contrast to the 1920s image of a Jazz Age flapper. In short, Ederle was an excellent role model for American girls.

Physical Characteristics: Gertrude Ederle was 5 ft 5 in (165 cm) tall and weighed 141 lb (64 kg). She had poor hearing since childhood due to measles and by the 1940s she was almost completely deaf.

Interests

• cooking

Connections

Gertrude Ederle was never married.

Father:

Henry Ederle

(1875-1944)

Mother:

Gertrude Anna (Haberstroh) Ederle

(died 1954)

References

• America's Girl: The Incredible Story of How Swimmer Gertrude Ederle Changed the Nation America's Girl is an intimate look at the life and trials of Gertrude Ederle, who in 1926 not only became the first woman to swim across the English Channel, but broke the record set by men.
  2009
• America's Champion Swimmer: Gertrude Ederle Trudy Ederle loved to swim, and she was determined to be the best. At seventeen Trudy won three medals at the 1924 Olympics in Paris. But what she planned to do next had never been done by a woman: she would swim across the English Channel in fourteen hours and set a world record.
  2000
• Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World In 1926, before skirt lengths inched above the knee and before anyone was ready to accept that a woman could test herself physically, a plucky American teenager named Trudy Ederle captured the imagination of the world when she became the first woman to swim the English Channel. It was, and still is, a feat more incredible and uncommon than scaling Mount Everest.
  2009
• Trudy's Big Swim: How Gertrude Ederle Swam the English Channel and Took the World by Storm On the morning of August 6, 1926, Gertrude Ederle stood in her bathing suit on the beach at Cape Gris-Nez, France, and faced the churning waves of the English Channel. Twenty-one miles across the perilous waterway, the English coastline beckoned. Lyrical text, stunning illustrations and fascinating back matter put the reader right alongside Ederle in her bid to be the first woman to swim the Channel and contextualizes her record-smashing victory as a defining moment in sports history.
  2017