Gertrude Ederle

Amateur career

Gertrude Ederle was raised in Manhattan, where her father owned a butcher shop on Amsterdam Avenue. She first learned how to swim in Highlands, New Jersey. At age twelve, she joined the Women's Swimming Association, or WSA, a club founded by Charlotte Epstein. The WSA was notable not just for swimming: its leaders and members fought for women's right to vote, pushed for more swimming competitions open to women, and worked to get more female athletes into the Olympics.

At the WSA, Ederle quickly picked up the American crawl, a stroke developed by head coach Louis Handley. That same year, she broke her first world record in the 880-yard freestyle, making her the youngest swimmer ever to hold a world record. She went on to set eight more world records, seven of them in 1922 at Brighton Beach. Between 1921 and 1925, she held a total of 29 U.S. national and world records.

At the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, Ederle earned a gold medal as part of the U.S. women's 4x100 meter freestyle relay team. Along with Euphrasia Donnelly, Ethel Lackie, and Mariechen Wehselau, she set a world record of 4:58.8 in the final. She also took home bronze medals in the individual 100-meter and 400-meter freestyle events. That year, the entire U.S. Olympic team was honored with a ticker-tape parade.

Professional career

In 1925, Gertrude Ederle became a professional swimmer and covered 22 miles from Battery Park to Sandy Hook in 7 hours and 11 minutes. That record stood for 81 years until Australian Tammy van Wisse beat it. Her nephew Bob later called that swim a "midnight frolic" and a "warm-up" for what came next. That same year, the Women's Swimming Association backed Ederle and Helen Wainwright for a shot at crossing the English Channel.

English Channel crossing

Wainwright dropped out due to injury, but Ederle went ahead on her own. She trained under Jabez Wolffe, a man who had tried and failed to swim the Channel 22 times. On August 18, 1925, she made her first attempt, but Wolffe ordered another swimmer, Ishak Helmy, to pull her from the water, disqualifying her. Ederle strongly disagreed with the call, and people suspected Wolffe did not want her to succeed.

She went back to New York and started training with Bill Burgess, who had successfully crossed the Channel in 1911. The New York Daily News and Chicago Tribune signed contracts with her, covering her costs and giving her a modest salary. About a year after her first try, she succeeded. She left from Cap Gris-Nez in France at 7:08 a.m. on August 6, 1926, and reached Kingsdown, Kent, 14 hours and 34 minutes later.

Because of stormy weather, she swam the equivalent of 35 miles, overshooting her planned landing spot. The first person to meet her was a British immigration officer, who asked for a passport from "the bleary-eyed, waterlogged teenager." Her record held until Florence Chadwick crossed the Channel in 1950 in 13 hours and 23 minutes. Before Ederle, only five men had ever completed the swim, with the fastest time of 16 hours and 33 minutes set by Enrique Tirabocchi. When she came home, Manhattan threw her a ticker-tape parade, with more than two million people lining the route.

Legacy

Gertrude Ederle was recognized as an Honor Swimmer by the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 1965, and later entered the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2003. A yearly race from Battery Park in New York City to Sandy Hook, New Jersey, called the Ederle Swim, follows the same path she once took. The Gertrude Ederle Recreation Center, which opened in 2013 on Manhattan's Upper West Side, bears her name and features an indoor pool. In Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, Ederle Terrace sits at the north end of Meadow Lake, marking the spot of an amphitheater where she performed during the 1939 New York World's Fair.

A BBC Radio 4 drama titled The Great Swim, written by Anita Sullivan and based on Gavin Mortimer's 2008 book, aired in 2010 and again in 2012, telling the story of her English Channel crossing. A memorial plaque was placed at Kingsdown in 2023, on the beach at Oldstairs Bay where she finished her swim. The biographical film Young Woman and the Sea, starring Daisy Ridley as Ederle, was released by Walt Disney Pictures on May 31, 2024.

Did You Know?

• As a result of childhood measles, Ederle had poor hearing most of her life, and by the 1940s had lost most of her hearing.
• She worked for much of her life as a swimming instructor for deaf children.
• She was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York City.