Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World (13 page)

As WSA swimmers continued to dominate every competition and set nearly every record at nearly every distance, in April 1919 the AAU announced that in 1920 it would sponsor Olympic tryouts and that the AOC would send a women's swimming and diving team to the Olympics. The decision, which only a few years before would have met staunch resistance, scarcely caused a ripple. Dozens of other fledgling women's swimming groups were hastily created all over the country. The first wave of American swimming talent was poised to take on the world.

The Ederle girls, particularly Margaret and Trudy, were beginning to move up in the ranks of WSA swimmers, but none was as yet in the top echelon of the group and under consideration for the Olympic team. Those swimmers who would participate in the Olympic tryouts would be the swimmers that Handley had the most success with, primarily girls who had joined the group soon after it had first formed and had done so while still quite young. Ethelda (Thelda) Bleibtrey, after contracting polio in 1917, which led to a curvature of her spine, had joined the WSA at the age of sixteen early in 1918, as part of her recovery, and within a year was the best swimmer in the group, undefeated at any distance. Young Aileen Riggin, only thirteen, had joined after surviving the Spanish flu to help with her recuperation. Already an accomplished dancer, the sprightly Riggin was not only one of the group's best swimmers but excelled at diving as well. Trudy and Margaret were improving, but were a year behind the groups' best swimmers.

All the WSA girls, including Trudy and her sisters, were among the crowd that gathered for the Olympic swimming and diving trials held at the Manhattan Beach ocean pool on July 10, 1920, the same pool that served as the home of the WSA during the late spring and summer. In addition to WSA swimmers such as Bleibtrey, Riggin, and the WSA's two other most accomplished swimmers, Charlotte Boyle and Helen Wainwright, the trials also included representatives of Philadelphia's Meadowlark Club, the Detroit Athletic Club, the Multnomah Athletic Club of Portland, Oregon, and several other groups.

It wasn't close. The WSA girls, with their mastery of the American crawl, dominated the contests: Thelda Bleibtrey beat the existing world record in the 100 meters in a trial heat, and then set the record again in the finals, knocking another half second off the mark. Aileen Riggin, now fourteen, and Helen Wainwright, another fourteen-year-old, dominated the diving competition despite the fact that both girls had been diving only a short time. Had the Olympic team been selected on the basis of the trials alone, the entire team could have been created from the roster of WSA swimmers; but for political reasons the AOC selected six girls from the WSA trained by Handley, and six swimmers not connected to the WSA.

Even so, it hardly mattered. With Charlotte Epstein serving as team manager and Handley's old colleague Otto Wahle acting as coach, the WSA swimmers were just as dominant in Antwerp as they had been at Manhattan Beach. Although conditions were horrible—the swimming competition was held in a frigid, silt-filled canal that left the girls shivering—Bleibtrey won the gold medal in both the 100- and 300-meter freestyle, winning the shorter distance in 1 minute 13⅗ seconds, more than three seconds faster than second-place finisher Irene Guest of Detroit. She then won the 300-meter freestyle in 4 minutes 34 seconds, nearly eight seconds better than American Mary Woodbridge and nearly ten seconds faster than any non-American. In the 400-meter relay the American team, paced by Bleibtrey, finished an incredible twenty-nine seconds ahead of runner-up Great Britain. Aileen Riggin, Helen Wainwright, and Helen Meany, all of the WSA, swept the springboard diving competition. As Riggin later recalled, the Americans' advantage was due almost solely to the crawl stroke developed by Handley. "We were the first girls to do it," she said, "and we won everything. That stroke took the world by storm." And in the wake of the Olympics, it also swept up Trudy Ederle.

As the first American women to win a medal at the Olympic Games, when Bleibtrey, Riggin, Wainwright, and the others returned to America they were greeted as heroes. For weeks they attended a steady stream of banquets and luncheons and parades, met politicians and other celebrities, and were even offered work as swimming coaches. To their fellow members of the WSA, like Trudy and her sisters, it was all a bit hard to believe that the girls who they swam alongside in the basement pool were famous. Trudy was particularly close to both Riggin and Wainwright, and she loved hearing their descriptions of the Olympic opening ceremonies, where thousands of white pigeons were released into the air and the swimmers wore white flannel pleated skirts and smart-looking navy blue jackets. Although Trudy had already traveled to Europe when her family visited relatives in Germany, she still hung on every word when Riggin and Wainwright described the nearly two-week trip across the Atlantic, where the swimmers, the only women among the hundreds of male athletes, were the object of constant attention from such well-known athletes as the Hawaiian swimming champ Duke Kahanamoku.

Although Trudy found it hard to imagine that she would ever swim well enough to make the Olympic team, at the same time the message was clear: if a girl was one of the top swimmers in the WSA, she was also one of the best swimmers in the world. For Trudy Ederle, that meant that anything, absolutely anything, was possible.

T
HE ENGLISH CHANNEL
is like no other body of water in the world.

Only twenty-one miles across at its narrowest point between Cape Gris-Nez (Cape Gray Nose) and Dover, those twenty-one miles can be the most treacherous waters in the world. The reason is the tide, for were it not for the tides, swimming the English Channel would have all the allure of swimming back and forth in a backyard pool for half a day or more in the middle of November. It is the tide that makes swimming the Channel so challenging, and the tide that has made swimming the Channel not only one of the most difficult athletic feats on the face of the earth, but also one of the best known and most romantic, a challenge that, once it takes hold of a swimmer, refuses to let go.

And to understand the tides one must understand the creation of the Channel itself.

The English Channel began in a flood. For eons, since the very first formation of Pangea—the ancient supercontinent that once included virtually the entire land surface of the earth—the land mass that eventually became England was not an island at all. As sea levels went up and down and the mechanics of plate tectonics alternately split continents apart and drove them back together, much of the island was alternately exposed and buried and exposed again as if a great tide were rising and falling, shaping it with each wave. Yet England itself remained fixed to the larger continent of Europe, its eastern and southern coasts folded into France.

During one such metaphorical wave about 205 million years ago, the south and east of England were covered by a warm, shallow sea absolutely teeming with microscopic marine life—plankton—that swirled in the currents and tides, rising and falling in the water column until death. Over time these infinitesimal remains inexorably drifted to the bottom of the sea, a slow but steady rain of calcium carbonate, its depth growing by one millimeter per century until the cumulative weight and pressure fused the remains together into a single massive strata, one that over some thirty-five million years eventually created a seafloor that in places measured more than three hundred meters deep.

The result—built up over those thirty-five million years—was chalk. It can be seen today not only in the white cliffs of Dover that reveal the full dimension of this incessant rain of microscopic life, but just inches beneath the ground in much of the south of England, in northwestern France, and elsewhere in western Europe. Each place there is chalk was once the bottom of the same vast primordial sea.

Then, over time, as ocean levels dropped and this sea began to re-cede, a vast portion of southern England, France, and northern Europe was exposed, a single land mass sandwiched between the North Sea and the northern Atlantic that scientists dubbed "Doggerland." As seas levels rose and fell and rivers carved their way through the chalk and poured into the sea to the north and to the south, England came to resemble a peninsula connected to France and the rest of the European continent by an isthmus, a massive chalk land bridge nearly two hundred meters high, covered by a thin layer of soil, that ran through Dover in England and Calais in France. Known to geologists as the Weald-Artois ridge, flora and fauna alike flowed back and forth across this land bridge without interruption. What lived in England also lived in France.

Then came the ice. Nearly two million years ago, as England drifted northward almost to its present position, the Northern Hemisphere entered an epoch marked by the advance and retreat of ice, periods of cooling that featured glaciation and the subsequent lowering of the sea level, separated by warmer periods in which the glaciers retreated and seas levels rose again. England was affected dramatically by these changes. During warm periods England became a savannah resembling modern-day Africa. When the temperature cooled the savanna turned to tundra, windswept and snow covered. And each time the ice came south it scoured the earth, carving wide, deep channels. In the south of England the ice began to cut into the strata of chalk that bound England to the continent.

Yet England and the European continent still remained joined together until some 450, 000 years ago, by which time early humans had reached both England and northern Europe, advancing and retreating in the wake of the ice. Then, sometime between 450, 000 and 200, 000 years ago as glaciers more than two thousand feet thick retreated, a lake of meltwater, trapped to the north by the retreating glaciers, built up behind the land bridge between England and France. Each day it grew ever larger and deeper as both the Rhine and the Thames rivers, draining an enormous watershed, combined with meltwater from the glaciers themselves to create a vast lake far larger than any ever seen on the planet before.

The land bridge, some thirty kilometers wide, became, in effect, a dam. To the north the great lake grew ever larger, while south of the bridge, the land now free of ice, the weather turned more temperate and created a mixture of grasslands, forests, marshes, and lakes. Fed by the Somme and the Seine rivers, a damp but fertile delta plain emptied into the North Atlantic. Great herds of game and vast numbers of birds and other animals took advantage of the natural bounty, as did small bands of men and women.

Had the great lake, hundreds of miles wide and far, far larger than any lake that exists on earth today, continued to fill, and had the glaciers not retreated so quickly, the lake may eventually have slowly breached the ridge, spilling over it first in a trickle and then, over time, eventually wearing down a channel and creating a massive waterfall and a river running southward, slowly draining the lake until the retreating glaciers finally created an outlet to the north that then would have allowed the waters to escape into the North Sea.

But this is not what happened. For reasons that are still not entirely clear, the land bridge between France and England suffered a massive, catastrophic failure, perhaps caused by an earthquake or other tectonic event.

In an instant, billions and billions of gallons of water, water that had rested placidly in the lake for thousands of years, began to move.

Those billions of gallons, which had long pressed upon the land bridge from the north, burst through in an act of watery violence the world had never before seen. The equivalent of one hundred Mississippi Rivers poured through the breach as up to
one million cubic
meters of water per second
roared down into the valley and then into the North Atlantic. Water and earth were sent downstream in an unimaginable torrent, a cataclysmic event that plowed and scoured and carved away at the surface of the lowlands, tearing deep into the chalk, carving away the land bridge in huge chunks, as one scientist described it, "like a buzz saw through Styrofoam." In this case the unstoppable force—water—met nothing immoveable. Gigantic sections of earth and rock acted like a bulldozer, while the torrent of water washed away everything before it like so much sand before a fire hose, scouring out a passage to the Atlantic.

And then, in only a few months, it was done. The lake was emptied and the flow of water slowed and then stopped. Now the dimension of the destruction was revealed. Every tree and blade of grass, every European bison, antelope, mammoth, wooly rhinoceros, cave lion, and deer, every member of every vast herd that lived in the valley was gone, swept into the water and washed into the sea, their existence there virtually erased. The land bridge itself was radically diminished, its center carved out in an enormous swath. Where man and animals had once roamed there was now only water. England became an island, separated from the European continent by what we know today as the English Channel, the path of this primordial flood.

England and Europe remained apart for at least the next hundred thousand years, separated by the sea, as the human residents of each place lurched toward civilization oblivious to the other. Then, ever so slowly, summers began to shorten and winter's tentacles reached out once again. The glaciers slowly returned, the sea level dropped, and the sea drained away from the valley to the south. The narrow remnants of the land bridge were exposed once more, tenuously joining England to the continent, and humans and animals and other life filled the valley one more time.

Incredibly, it all happened again. The earth warmed and as the glaciers retreated a second great lake backed up behind the land bridge to the north, growing larger and deeper each day, fed by the Rhine and the Thames, filling with water the great cuts and gouges the glaciers had cut into the earth.