Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World by Glenn Stout

Author:Glenn Stout [Stout, Glenn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Nonfiction, Retail, Sports, Swimming, Trudy Ederle
ISBN: 9780618858682
Amazon: 0618858687
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2009-07-28T04:00:00+00:00

17. Comeback

THE ONLY WRESTLING Trudy did on the return trip aboard the America was with the voice in her own head that kept asking what had gone wrong.

After her defeat Trudy Ederle initially had precious little time to dwell on her failure. Olympic officials were so worried about leaving young women unoccupied in Paris that after the end of the competition Charlotte Epstein and Louis Handley took the entire team to England, crossing the Channel by boat to swim an exhibition, and then crossing back again to make another appearance in Brussels before returning to Paris for the closing ceremonies and then boarding the America for home.

For most of her teammates, the return trip was a nonstop party. Without the pressure of competition they acted like tourists on a cruise, and no one had to worry about staying in shape. But Trudy kept to herself, replaying her races over and over in her head, wondering what had gone wrong and what she possibly could have done about it, but she had no answer. Fortunately, although the Olympics had ended with disappointment for her, America hardly noticed. Despite some pre-Olympic fears by some observers that young American athletes were more concerned with "hot" music, bobbed hairdos, and rising hemlines rather than with the raucous cheers that accompanied falling records, the United States had dominated Olympic competition in very nearly every event, leading all countries with a total of 93 medals, one-quarter of the 361 medals awarded at the games, including 45 golds. In team scoring, the United States was just as dominant, winning the overall championship in eight of the twenty sports—track and field, tennis, rowing, wrestling, shooting, boxing, rugby, and, of course, swimming.

In fact, in the water the United States had been most dominant of all, winning fully 80 percent of all medals, and the women's team failed to win gold in only one event—the 200-meter breaststroke. As the Literary Digest noted, quoting the Pittsburgh Sun, the victory "indicated that American youth, despite much head shaking and lamentation, is able to hold its own with the youth and stamina of the rest of the world ... It indicates that an age that is commonly said to be going soft is not entirely flabby." As a result, Trudy faced little direct criticism for her personal failure. America had won, so her personal failure was virtually overlooked, but in some ways that was even worse. She had left for Paris as one of the teams' best-known stars but returned as just another competitor.

But in his official report to the AOC, Louis Handley made it clear that as far as he was concerned Trudy's performance was not her fault, but that of the AOC, the result of its poor planning in regard to transportation and accommodations for the women's team. He went out of the way to single out her experience and excuse her performance, the only individual swimmer he so cited. "I cannot say to what extent the track and field men suffered," he wrote, "but I know the swimmers were affected materially.

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