featured-image

he are still two months away, but to tide you over, there's a new Disney movie about an Olympic swimmer making a splash in theaters. In , out Friday and directed by Joachim Rønning, stars as Gertrude "Trudy" Ederle, the first woman to swim the English channel. Ederle, an American, was a major figure in the nascent world of women’s sports in the 1920s and dominated women’s swimming.

“She held virtually every world record you could hold for ” said Glenn Stout, author of the 2009 book that inspired the film, . The movie takes pains to depict Ederle’s life faithfully and to make the movie seem as realistic as possible. For example, the swimming scenes were shot on the open ocean, in the and the .



The film starts with Ederle as a child on death’s door with measles in a New York City tenement. She makes a miraculous recovery with slight hearing damage and becomes determined to learn how to swim like her sister Meg and the athletes training on . 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 into the Atlantic Ocean to teach her himself.

In the film, Trudy is depicted playing the ukulele all day every day and singing off-key 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 launched to teach women how to swim after th.

Back to Fashion Page