Gertrude Ederle

Gertrude Caroline Ederle (; October 23, 1905 – November 30, 2003) was an American competition swimmer, Olympic champion, and world record-holder in five events. On August 6, 1926, she became the first woman to swim across the English Channel. Among other nicknames, the press called her "Queen of the Waves".





== Amateur career ==

Ederle grew up in Manhattan where her father ran a butcher shop on Amsterdam Avenue, and learned to swim in Highlands, New Jersey. She later trained at the Women's Swimming Association (WSA), founded by Charlotte Epstein. The WSA was a historic organization whose leadership and members campaigned for Women's suffrage, and worked both to create more swimming events open to women and to increase their participation in the Olympics. Ederle joined the club when she was only twelve and immediately took to learning the American crawl, developed at the WSA by Head Coach Louis Handley. The same year, she set her first world record in the 880-yard freestyle, becoming the youngest world record holder in swimming. She set eight more world records after that, seven of them in 1922 at Brighton Beach. In total, Ederle held 29 US national and world records from 1921 until 1925.