# Gertrude Ederle

Gertrude Caroline Ederle (/ˈɛdərli/; October 23, 1905 – November 30, 2003) was an American competition swimmer, Olympic champion, and world record-holder in five events. On August 6, 1926, she became the first woman to swim across the English Channel. Among other nicknames, the press called her "Queen of the Waves".

## Amateur career

Ederle grew up in Manhattan where her father ran a butcher shop on Amsterdam Avenue, and learned to swim in Highlands, New Jersey. She later trained at the Women's Swimming Association (WSA), founded by Charlotte Epstein. The WSA was an historic organization whose leadership and members campaigned for Women's suffrage, and worked both to create more swimming events open to women and to increase their participation in the Olympics. Ederle joined the club when she was only twelve and immediately took to learning the American crawl, developed at the WSA by Head Coach Louis Handley. The same year, she set her first world record in the 880-yard freestyle, becoming the youngest world record holder in swimming. She set eight more world records after that, seven of them in 1922 at Brighton Beach. In total, Ederle held 29 US national and world records from 1921 until 1925.

### 1924 Paris Olympic medalist

At the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, Ederle won a gold medal as a member of the first-place U.S. team in the 4×100 meter freestyle relay. Together with her American relay teammates Euphrasia Donnelly, Ethel Lackie and Mariechen Wehselau, she set a new world record of 4:58.8 in the event final. Individually, she received bronze medals for finishing third in the women's 100-meter freestyle and women's 400-meter freestyle races. The U.S. Olympic team had its own ticker-tape parade in 1924.

## Professional career

In 1925, Ederle turned professional. The same year she swam the 22 miles (35 km) from Battery Park to Sandy Hook in 7 hours and 11 minutes, a record time which stood for 81 years before being broken by Australian swimmer Tammy van Wisse. Ederle's nephew Bob later described his aunt's swim as a "midnight frolic" and a "warm-up" for her later swim across the English Channel.

### English Channel crossing

In 1925, the Women's Swimming Association sponsored Helen Wainwright and Ederle for an attempt at swimming across the English Channel. Helen Wainwright cancelled due to an injury, so Ederle decided to go to France on her own. She trained with Jabez Wolffe, a swimmer who had attempted to swim the English Channel 22 times. On August 18, 1925, Ederle made her first attempt at swimming the Channel whereupon she was disqualified when Wolffe ordered another swimmer (who was keeping her company in the water), Ishak Helmy, to recover her from the water. She bitterly disagreed with Wolffe's decision and it was speculated that he did not want Ederle to succeed.
She returned to New York and began training with coach Bill Burgess who had successfully swum the Channel in 1911. Ederle also received a contract from both the New York Daily News and Chicago Tribune which paid her expenses and provided her with a modest salary. Approximately one year after her first attempt, she was successful in swimming the Channel. She started at Cap Gris-Nez in France at 07:08 am on August 6, 1926, and came ashore at Kingsdown, Kent, 14 hours and 34 minutes later. The first person to greet her was a British immigration officer who requested a passport from "the bleary-eyed, waterlogged teenager". Her record stood until Florence Chadwick swam the Channel in 1950 in 13 hours and 23 minutes.
Prior to Ederle, only five men had completed the swim across the English Channel, with the best time of 16 hours, 33 minutes by Enrique Tirabocchi.
When Ederle returned home, she was greeted with a ticker-tape parade in Manhattan, with more than two million people along the parade route.

### Later career

She made an arrangement with Edward L. Hyman to appear at the Brooklyn Mark Strand Theatre, who paid her significantly more than any prior individual performer. Subsequently, she went on to play herself in a movie (Swim Girl, Swim starring Bebe Daniels) and tour the vaudeville circuit, including later Billy Rose's Aquacade. She met President Coolidge and had a song and a dance step named for her. Her manager, Dudley Field Malone, was not able to capitalize on her fame and popularity, diminishing the financial potential of her vaudeville career. The Great Depression also affected the success of her career. A fall down the steps of her apartment building in 1933 twisted her spine and left her bedridden for several years, but she recovered sufficiently to appear at the 1939 New York World's Fair.nv

## Death

As a result of childhood measles, Ederle had poor hearing most of her life, and by the 1940s had lost most of her hearing. Aside from her time in vaudeville, she worked for much of her life as a swimming instructor for deaf children. She never married and by 2001 lived in a nursing home. She died on November 30, 2003, in Wyckoff, New Jersey, at the age of 98. She was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York City.

## Legacy

Ederle was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame as an "Honor Swimmer" in 1965. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2003.
An annual swim from New York City's Battery Park to Sandy Hook, New Jersey, is named the Ederle Swim to honor her, and follows the course she swam.
The Gertrude Ederle Recreation Center, which opened in 2013 and is located in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, was named for her, and includes an indoor swimming pool.
A BBC Radio 4 play, The Great Swim, by Anita Sullivan, based on the 2008 book of the same name by Gavin Mortimer, was first broadcast on September 1, 2010, and repeated on January 23, 2012. It dramatizes Ederle's record-breaking crossing of the English Channel.
A biographical film, Young Woman and the Sea, based on the book of the same name by Glenn Stout, was produced by Walt Disney Pictures and Jerry Bruckheimer, directed by Joachim Rønning, and starring Daisy Ridley as Ederle. The film was released on May 31, 2024.