TThe 2024 Paris Summer Olympics are still two months away, but to help you out, there’s a new Disney film about an Olympic swimmer making a splash in theaters. In Young woman and the seareleased Friday and directed by Joachim Rønning, Daisy Ridley stars as Gertrude “Trudy” Ederle, the first woman to swim the channel in England.
Ederle, an American, was a leading figure in the nascent world of women’s sports in the 1920s and dominated women’s swimming.
“She held virtually every world record in women’s freestyle swimming,” said Glenn Stout, author of the 2009 book that inspired the film, The young girl and the sea: how Trudy Ederle conquered the English Channel and inspired the world.
The film strives to faithfully portray Ederle’s life and make the film feel as realistic as possible. For example, the swimming scenes were filmed in the open sea, the Black Sea and the English Channel.
Childhood in New York
The film begins with Ederle as a dying child with measles in a New York tenement. She makes a miraculous recovery from mild hearing damage and becomes determined to learn to swim like her sister Meg and the athletes who train at Coney Island. The pools are afraid to let her in the water in case she is still contagious, so her father ties a rope around Ederle and takes her to the Atlantic Ocean to teach her alone. In the film, Trudy is depicted playing the ukulele all day, every day, and singing out of tune until her father agrees to let her swim, a charming scene, but according to Stout, not one that actually happened.
Eventually she is coached by Charlotte Epstein, who founded the Women’s Swimming Association. The organization was launched to teach women to swim after 1904 General Slocum disaster, in which more than 1,000 people, mostly women and children, drowned when a passenger ship caught fire in New York’s East River. Soon, Ederle collected all the swimming medals that a woman could win in amateur competitions. At the 1924 Paris Olympics, she won a gold medal in the relay and two bronze medals.
As the film shows, Ederle actually swam more than 25 miles from Lower Manhattan to Sandy Hook, New Jersey. In the film, Ridley embarks on the arduous swim to secure funding for his English Channel attempt, emerging from the water to surprise a potential sponsor as he dines on seafood with his mother. Drenched, she joins them to eat. Although this wasn’t how she got the sponsorship in real life, the scene shows how far she was willing to go to swim the English Channel.
The Women’s Swimming Association planned to sponsor another woman, Helen Wainwright, to swim the English Channel, but when she was injured, Ederle intervened.
A failed attempt at channel one
Her first attempt at channeling in 1925 ended when she became ill and had to be rescued. Ederle always believed she had been poisoned and distrusted her trainer, Jabez Wolffe, because there were other women he preferred to train for the feat. In the film, Ederle is seen reuniting with her father and sister and immediately returning to France. In fact, she waited another year to try again.
Ederle changed coaches on the second attempt, hiring Bill Burgess, and that made all the difference. Burgess, the second man to swim the English Channel, was Wolffe’s rival. “I think Burgess wanted to prove he was a better coach than Wolffe,” says Stout. It was Burgess who taught Ederle to swim with the tides, not against them.
Ederle’s sister Meg also helped in important ways, like using candle wax to patch holes in her sister’s goggles and cutting Ederle’s suit into two pieces – forming what could be the first bikini – and making it more tight so that it doesn’t create any drag and irritation for her. But they failed to protect it against the countless jellyfish, sharks and old sea mines from the First World War.
Subsisting on fried chicken thrown to her in the water, Ederle successfully completed the swim on August 6, 1926, in 14 hours and 31 minutes, beating the men’s record by 2 hours. The achievement “destroyed the argument that women were not physically capable of competing in sports,” says Stout. “At the 1928 Olympics, many other events were opened to women because of Trudy’s success in 1926.”
The film recreates images of the parade in honor of Ederle on August 27, 1926, in New York City. Once the parade was over, she generally avoided the spotlight. She did some stunts, like swimming in a tank for a vaudeville show. Over the years, she found it difficult to make public appearances, between a back injury from a fall in 1933 and worsening hearing from swimming. She did, however, enjoy teaching swimming to deaf children for many years. Ederle died in 2003 in a New Jersey nursing home, aged 98. Times obituary reported that she never married but left 10 nieces and nephews.
She reflected on her swimming record in one of her last interviews in 2001 with the New York Times. “It turns out everyone was saying it couldn’t be done. Well, every time someone said that, I wanted to prove that it could be done. It took a Yankee to show them how.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
