Waterford’s Own Ethelda Bleibtrey

I couldn’t count how many times I must have biked past this historical marker in the park at the end of the Troy-Waterford bridge without ever noticing it until a few weeks ago. Maybe a construction detour that forced me onto the sidewalk made the difference. In any event, it was the very first time I had heard of Ethelda Bleibtrey.

But I should have, even if she weren’t a local product, because she had something of an amazing and inspirational life. Ethelda was born in Waterford in 1902, the daughter of a mortician. She took her first swim in Saratoga Lake at the age of 6. She contracted polio in 1917, resulting in spinal curvature, and she took up swimming to strengthen her limbs a year later when she went to Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn. She caught the attention of Olympic swimmer and water polo player Louis deBreda Handley, who introduced a new training regimen for female swimmers, at a time when female athletes were still a novelty. It wasn’t long before Ethelda was competing against Australian Fanny Durack, who held 11 world records.  She beat Durack in a quarter-mile race at Coney Island in 1919, and found herself on the 1920 U.S. Olympic team in Antwerp, Belgium, where she won three gold medals.

As a side note, her Encyclopaedia Britannica article says that “In 1919, she was arrested for ‘nude swimming’ — she removed her stockings at a pool where it was forbidden to bare ‘the lower female extremities for public bathing.’ The subsequent public support for Bleibtrey led to the abandonment of stockings as a conventional element in women’s swimwear.” So she had that going on.

She apparently traveled the world – she’s seen here in a picture from the Library of Congress with Duke Kahanamoku – and competed in Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere, for another few years, but never appeared in another Olympics. Britannica says she never lost a race as an amateur, and turned professional in 1922. She married, moved to Long Island, taught swimming and worked with children afflicted with cerebral palsy and polio.

She died in 1978 in West Palm Beach, Florida.

More on Ethelda here and here.