The Watermen: The Birth of American Swimming and One Young Man's Fight to Capture Olympic Gold by Michael Loynd

Author:Michael Loynd [Loynd, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780593357040
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2022-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

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Three days later, on a gray Saturday that hovered just above freezing, Charley walked out of his Greenwich Village apartment in a trench coat, suit, and tie, mentally preparing himself to implement the crawl for the first time in an official AAU-sanctioned century race. Just as he had eschewed his old trudgen stroke, he was no longer obliged to take the old, coal-choked elevated train. For a five-cent fee he could experience the revolutionary engineering marvel of the city’s new subway, with its olive-green cars that whizzed through underground tunnels, through the darkness and unfamiliar air, suddenly shooting into beautiful stations with white-tiled walls that bore big signs telling the location, which the elevated never had.

When Charley arrived at the club’s natatorium that evening, all eyes were upon him. His fellow Winged Footers were probably betting among themselves as to whether their devout trudgen champion would flip religions. As he lined up at the scratch position in the century handicap race, with all of his opponents assigned head starts, some as much as ten seconds, Otto Wahle readied his stopwatch as one of the official timers.

At the referee’s signal, the men started diving in at their assigned handicaps. One by one, Charley watched his competition make their way farther and farther down the tank until he was the last man dry. Finally, the official fired his pistol and Charley dove.

It was a poor start. Both feet fluttered, and one person reported he used a scissor kick. Once he found his groove, one lower leg splashed about forty degrees out of the water, then the other. Two kicks—left, right—with each arm stroke, taking no more than two breaths each twenty-five-yard lap. Handley remarked later that “Daniels seemed to positively crawl over and above the water.” The next morning’s edition of The New York Times would report that he plowed through the pool as if propelled by a motor. But at some point after fifty yards, he knew he would face the monster. At seventy-five yards, he had passed everyone and now the lactic acid buildup in his tightened muscles screamed for him to stop. The last lap was a fight between himself and the pain and heavy arms that no longer wanted to work. When Charley hit the final wall, a commotion broke out among the four timers, who began frantically comparing watches. Wahle looked up from his stopwatch and down at Charley with delight. He had just swum the century two-fifths of a second faster than Healy’s and Cavill’s fifty-eight-second world record.

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