Gertrude was born on Oct. 23, 1905 in New York City to German immigrants. She loved to swim as a girl and dropped out of school as a teenager to train as a competitive swimmer. She joined the Women’s Swimming Association. She invented the “eight beat crawl” which was eight kicks per arm stroke. From 1921-1925 she set 29 national and world records. In 1922, she broke seven records in one day. At the 1924 Olympics in Paris, she won the gold medal as part of the 4×100 freestyle relay. She won bronze medals for the 100 meter and 400 meter freestyle. In 1925, her first attempt to swim the English Channel failed, but on August 6, 1926 she succeeded. She coated her body with lanolin to protect from jellyfish stings and the cold. She was accompanied by a tugboat with her trainer and family. She had to swim 35 miles from Cape Gris-Nez to Dover (a 21 mile distance on a straight line). She did it in 14 hours and 31 minutes, breaking the male record by almost two hours. (The first to swim the Channel was Matthew Webb in 1875.) She returned to a ticker tape parade in New York City and a visit to the White House where Coolidge called her “America’s Best Girl”. The rest of the country knew her as “Queen of the Waves”. She went on a vaudeville tour, giving swimming demonstrations. She continued to swim competitively until a serious back injury in 1933. She taught deaf kids to swim. (She eventually went deaf herself.) She never got married and lived with female friends in NYC for her later years and died in 2003 at age 98.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gertrude-Ederle
https://www.biography.com/athlete/gertrude-ederle
from Wikipedia Commons
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