The Three-Year Swim Club by Julie Checkoway

Author:Julie Checkoway [CHECKOWAY, JULIE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2015-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

The Coral Casino Club at the Biltmore hotel was no casino at all but an exclusive and private beach club, contemporary and sleek and opened in the summer of 1937. The resort tried hard to be a substitute for the ones in Monte Carlo and Cannes that no one could visit anymore. It hosted stars and filmmakers; Gloria Vanderbilt, all of seventeen, would hold her wedding reception there. Legend had it that the place was never intended to be the site of any swimming competition; the story went that the builders, in the midst of a poker game, made a deal never to let that happen and instead built the “Olympic-sized” pool at an irregular 50 meters plus one foot, although in spite of irregularity, the tank was, on July 4, 1940, decked out with bunting in celebration both of the Fourth of July and the start of the AAU Men’s National Swimming Championships.

Amidst the socialites and club members on the deck, Soichi Sakamoto saw some of the swimmers with whom his team had competed in the past, but he also saw others who had fallen away from swimming and into the high life: some had relinquished their amateur status and had taken Broadway’s Billy Rose up on his offer to become paid clowns in his gaudy Aquacade; and even if a swimmer traded swimming for the humiliation of frolicking about the water in a costume and makeup, at least the money was good. Other swimmers who graduated college had nowhere else to go but back on deck. They couldn’t make money off of anything to do with swimming without running afoul of AAU rules and being stripped of their amateur status.

On the upside, the fact that some old rivals weren’t in the pool was of great advantage to Sakamoto’s swimmers. Ralph Flanagan was there but not as a swimmer any longer. Having gone pro, he’d also gotten married in the spring, and he now traveled along with his wife, the famed American diver Ruth Jump, in tow and wearing fur. With Flanagan in the bleachers, that left room for new winners in the 440-yard, the 880-yard, and the mile. The papers had caught on, calling it a possible “wild scramble… for laurels.”

The tension before the meet was high. The Coral Casino put the heater on in the pool and the water temperature rose to a comfortable 74 degrees. Sakamoto said nothing of the sort, but some of the other coaches were willing to go on the record saying that the pool was a fast one, and that there’d be some record-breaking to come. The advantage of having half saltwater and half freshwater also meant, they pointed out, more buoyancy for the swimmers.

The heats began on the Fourth itself, but there were few fireworks for Sakamoto’s swimmers. The 220-yard freestyle, which should have been a cinch for Halo or Keo, became a struggle. Otto Jaretz led the whole race, with a steady, methodical pace ahead of Adolph Kiefer, Paul Herron,

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