Young Woman and the Sea directed by Joachim Rønning (2024)
Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World by Glenn Stout (2009)
This is the true story of Gertrude Ederle, aka Trudy Ederly, the first woman to swim the English Channel. No one talks about swimming the Channel anymore, but at the time it was the big thing to do. It is 21 miles, but the swimmer ends up going much farther then that due to the changing tides. The weather in this area is also unpredictable and it is a very difficult stretch to swim. The first man to do so was swimming for 22 hours! The rules of the swim are that the swimmer must stay in the water at all times and not even be touched by another human.
Needless to say, this is a difficult task regardless of gender. But when a woman finally achieved this (and was the sixth personal overall to do so), it also disproved so many beliefs that women were incapable of endurance activities. She paved the way for female athletes, not just swimming, but endurance sports in general!
I am not a swimmer, but as a woman who runs marathons, I love to discover these stories of the female pioneers who paved the way before us. The movie is on Disneyplus and while I have my complains with the film, which we will get into, I think it is still worth watching.
The book was fascinating because it not only talked about Ederle but also the history of swimming the Channel, the history of swimming in general, the freestyle swim, which Ederle used, was also new and the history of how we came about to use that method of swimming was so interesting! While this book isn’t my favorite nonfiction book I have ever read, I still loved it and would highly recommend it!
From here on out I will get into the details of the story which means there will be spoilers going forward!
Women and swimming
The history of swimming is so wild because for so long it was not only taboo to learn how to swim, but if you could swim you were considered evil. We all know how they would throw women into the water and if they could stay afloat, they were considered a witch! Of course, on top of that, it was seen as immoral.
Not many men knew how to swim either, but through the centuries it was definitely the women who were kept from learning. Until 1904 in New York when a ship called the Slocum caught fire and despite being close to shore and the water not being very deep, over 1,000 people died-mostly women and children. (The movie shows this to be 1914, but the real tragedy was 1904). Not many men were aboard because it was a weekday and they were at work, so it was mostly women and children and the women weren’t able to save their own children because they didn’t even know how to swim.
We read, “While greed and corruption had certainly played a role in the tragedy, so too did an outdated and oppressive set of social mores that discouraged women from learning how to swim and take control of their own destiny. Most of those who had known how to swim—mostly male crew members and young men and boys—had survived. Those who did not know how to swim—mothers and young women and girls—had not.”
Due to this disaster, girls and women were now allowed to learn to swim as a safety precaution. Because swimming can save lives, that is why it was deemed okay to learn, if women wanted to learn to swim for enjoyment it would have taken longer for it to be seen as okay. Swimming was the first endurance sport that was taken seriously in some ways, and it paved the way for other endurance sports that had nothing to do with safety and were just about enjoyment and competition. It’s just interesting that simply wanting to do something wasn’t good enough and there had to be a life and death situation to make it accepted.
As we read in the book, “For most young women of the time there were absolutely no outlets for sports of any kind, not to mention swimming. While there was still staunch resistance to teaching women to swim simply for pleasure, in the wake of the Slocum disaster, instruction in “lifesaving” was another thing entirely. Reluctantly, the United States Volunteer Life Saving Corps (USVLSC), a group formed after the Civil War that previously had trained male swimmers in lifesaving techniques, began to allow women to join the group.”
At this time though, people were swimming primarily the breaststroke and dog paddle. Those who swam the channel prior to Ederle swam the whole way using the breaststroke and side stroke.
I won’t get into the whole story with the freestyle, but white people saw indigenous people doing this and it was carried over. When a white man was scene doing it in public, someone commented that it looked like he was crawling on the water, so it was called the American Crawl.
Lou Handley was a swim coach who was a firm believer in the crawl being the best method of swimming. He was hired to coach girl swimmers for the newly formed Women’s Swimming Association (WSA) in New York which was organized by Charlotte Epstein and he was integral in the training of Trudy Ederle.
The movie has Charlotte Epstein be the coach, but in real life the coach was Handley. As said, Epstein was the founder so she was an important figure, but Handley was the coach. I get they wanted to consolidate characters for the movie, and it was making more of a point by having a female swim coach rather than having it be a man. While I can apricate this change to some extent because if you have to get rid of one of them, it makes sense for this movie to get rid of the man I guess since this is a story about female empowement, but I liked that Handley was a man who felt all people should swim regardless of gender and he took these girl swimmers just as seriously as he did the boys he had trained in the past. The movie can be annoying at times in its desire to show basically every man as being against women’s rights. There were men who were on the side of the suffragettes and women’s lib.
Young Trudy Ederle
In both, we see that Trudy gets the measles at a young age. The movie is very dramatic about this and in real life it was serious but I don’t know if they thought she was on the brink of death. But despite surviving, the measles has the after effect of making her partially deaf; her bad hearing is something that is focused on much more in book than movie.
In the movie, the father doesn’t want her to swim for fear it will make her hearing worse. In the real life, she still learns to swim along with her siblings and it isn’t a big deal like in the movie. In real life she did not sing the same song for hours on end in an attempt to get her father to give in as we see in the film.
Also, the movie almost makes them seem maybe not poor, but not upper class. Whereas in real life, the father was a very successful butcher and the family was quite wealthy.
But Trudy Ederle starts swimming at a young age and falls in love with it. She and her sister Meg join a local girls swimming club (the WSA) but Meg is considered the better swimmer. Then during a race, Trudy surprises everyone and wins. After this, Handley focuses on her more and helps her to break one record after another.
In real life it was an outdoor race in the ocean and she shocks everyone by winning. But the movie makes this more dramatic showing that she slips at the start, and yet is still able to win.
In the movie, Trudy was seen as such a poor swimmer that in order to keep her spot on the swim team, she had to feed coal to the boiler (in both book and movie, the indoor pool they used was in a boiler room). She is bullied by the other girls, and over time, Epstein has them race amongst each other and the loser has to be on coal duty. Trudy often loses, but finally over time, she gets better and doesn’t have to do it. This was not the case in real life. In the movie she literally comes across as Cinderella (this was produced by Disney so maybe that was intention) and it came across a bit too cheesy.
The Olympics
Then the 1924 Olympics happen and America is letting a limited number of women participate in the swimming. Trudy is chosen to be one of those going and everyone assumes she will win gold in everything she is in. However, due to a variety of reasons, she doesn’t do as well as she had hoped.
In real life, the swimmers, both male and female, had a hard time training on the long ship ride to France. They had to swim in a tiny pool, like 6 feet long, with a rope attached and this was less than ideal. Ederle also wrestled one of the male Olympians on board and this might have caused a minor injury that affected her during the races. But even once in Paris, there were long, bumpy rides to get to and from their hotel and again, this also was not ideal for someone trying to be in peak physical condition. She did win one gold and two bronze medals, but she had hoped for all gold and was disappointed.
In the movie, Jabez Wolfe is the coach for the team and his sexism stops the women swimmers from even being able to use their tiny rope pool. In real life, Wolfe wasn’t associated with the Olympics at all so the movie has him introduced earlier and sets him up as a villain right off the bat. The movie makes it seem like the men and women Olympians didn’t co-mingle, but as said, Trudy ended up wrestling one of the guys when others wanted to see who would win. So there was co-mingling and they did have fun to an extent. But their training definitely took a hit.
Swimming the channel
When she returns home, she decides to take on the English Channel in hopes of being the first female ever to do so. In the movie, the thought of a woman doing the swim was ludicrous but Ederle gets Epstein to help champion her and get the swimming assocation to pay for her way despite the doubts of the guy in charge. They way they are even able to convince this guy is because she makes a bet with him that she can swim to Jersey in 3 hours and she succeeds and so he pays for her to go.
In real life, people all over the world were racing to be the first woman across. For the WSA they wanted one of their swimmers to be the first. They had chosen one of their other swimmers but were going to bring Ederle along just in case. However, the other woman gets injured and so it is all on Ederle.
In the movie it is dramatic when they arrive in the Channel area with her being the only woman there attempting the swim, but again, in real life there were a number of other women there training to be the fist.
In real life, she doesn’t make a bet with the swim association guy, but she does swim from Battery to Sandy Hook which is 16 miles. She does this as a training swim, and in doing so broke the previous record time held by a man.
Ederle and Wolfe
The WSA selected her coach in both book and movie and choose Wolfe. In the movie we already don’t like him from her experience with the Olympics but in the book, she had never met him before.
In the book, and real life, he was a man who has attempted to swim the channel many many times but has never been successful. Nonetheless, he is trusted due to his years of experience and knowledge.
Wolfe and Ederle bump heads right from the start though and long story short-while she is attempting the swim, he poisons her! In both, she gets weirdly sleepy and disoriented in both book and movie, and she is pulled from the water. To swim the channel the rules are that no one can touch the swimmer and even a brushing of fingers discounts the swim. So as soon as someone went to touch her to bring her in, it was over.
But yeah, the reason she suddenly felt so tired and sluggish was because he had put something in the beef tea he gave her. In the movie, he wanted to prevent her from accomplishing this because he and the guy in charge of the swimming association say how they are tired of the advancement of women and want to do their part to prevent women from this latest achievement. In the book, sure Wolfe was sexist to some degree, but it was also in his financial interest for Trudy to fail. As said, many women wanted to be the first to cross and if Trudy succeeds, then there wouldn’t be as much of a demand for him as a coach. But if she fails, there will still be many women in need of a coach in order to attempt to be the first so he will have more clients if she fails. Also in both book and movie we see that he himself has never swam the channel successfully so he had a chip on his shoulder at the audacity of a young woman thinking she could do what he never could.
In real life, Ederle and her escort piece together that Wolfe poisoned her and when they get back to the states, she implies as much when asked what happened. This causes drama back and forth between her and Wolfe which the news reports on.
In real life, she had stayed in Europe in hopes of getting a second chance across, this time with a man named Burgess who had successfully swam across and was the second man to do so. However, the weather gets colder and colder and their window of opportunity is lost, so she flies back home.
In the movie, Burgess approaches her in the hospital and he is who points out that she must have been poisoned. In the film, she still has time to swim again that same year and there is this elaborate escape where she is on the ship to go home with the WSA guy, but then she jumps out of her room window and swims into a boat with her father and sister who had flown out to see her when they heard she was sick.
This was pretty dramatic in the movie and almost came across a bit silly, kind of like the Cinderella stuff.
Swimming the second time
In real life, during the next year she is able to get a newspaper to sponsor her to attempt the swim a second time. Her attempt was so popular with radio listeners and the news outlets see that this is the type of serialized story that people love and will get them a lot of listeners and readers. So they pay for her travels and training, and send along a journalist to get one on one time with Trudy and get personalized documentation that no other news outlet will have. In real life, her father and sister Meg join her in this attempt. (There is a tugboat that goes along with the swimmer to give them aid and on the second attempt, Burgess, the journalist, Meg, and the father are on this tugboat).
In the movie, as said, she just stays behind and with the help of Burgess, Meg, and her father, goes out for the second swim.
Long story short-she succeeds. The movie makes a big deal of this area called the shallows and she ends up in this area and the tugboat that goes with her had to leave so she is all alone but she is able to overcome the odds and make her way out of the shallows and onto shore.
In real life there wasn’t this dramatic moment with the shallows and the boat having to leave her. Instead, in read life a storm starts raging partway through and on deck they are arguing because some of them think she should call it quits due to the weather but others say she can keep going. As this arguing is happening, Trudy is aloof because despite the weather, she is enjoying her swimming and is in the zone. Eventually, someone on board gets her attention and yells for her to quit and come on board. Trudy chuckles and yells back, “What for?” and keeps swimming along. She kept swimming through the storm and she and the boat arrive on the English shore 14 hours and 31 minutes later. Not only was she now the first woman to cross, but she swam it two hours faster than any of the men before her. This also helped the American Crawl be taken more seriously because none of the men before her had swam it in that style.
After the Channel
The movie ends with her returning to America where they have a huge parade in New York City in her honor. The movie tells us that she eventually lost her hearing and spent the rest of her life teaching deaf children how to swim.
This is true to real life as well, however in real life she first went to Germany to see her grandparents. She was there for three whole weeks before then returning to the USA. There was fame and fortune to be had by the first woman to swim across, and at first it seemed that her three week break in Germany didn’t hinder this as there was a huge celebration and she was in high demand. However, just a few days after her return, another woman crossed the Channel. This woman returned to America right away and cashed in on the fame and sponsorships. She was also better in public than Trudy who was shy in public due to being hard of hearing. After swimming the channel her hearing was even worse which made her uncomfortable being in the spotlight.
It seems her manager and father didn’t make the best decisions, Trudy being only 20 left all of these details up to them. Their poor choices on top of her losing her hearing, caused Trudy to eventually fade from the public eye and over time was forgotten. In the book we read, “After swimming the English Channel, Trudy Ederle should have taken her place as one of the foremost athletes of the twentieth century, on par with such luminaries as Jim Thorpe, Babe Didrickson, and other pioneers, the female equivalent of Hillary and Norgay, or Jackie Robinson, yet through no fault of her own —except, perhaps, her own innate shyness and reticence—she was forgotten almost immediately. If there is any continuing tragedy to her story, it is that.”
She lived a long life though and as the movie says, spent time teaching deaf children to swim. She never had a family of her own, but stayed close to her family and nieces and nephews.
Her father
A big change from book to movie is the details regarding her father. In the movie, he is against his daughters learning to swim and always dismisses Trudy’s accomplishments. He also tries to set Trudy up with a man to marry, which she and Meg sabotage. It isn’t until her failure to swim the channel that he has an awakening and flies to France to see her and shows that he now fully supports her.
This was not the case in the book at all. Yes her mother encouraged the girls to join the WSA, but the father is the one who taught all of his children how to swim and was fine with his daughters being in the swim club. The mother did not have to make things to sell on the side in order to pay for her daughter’s swim memberships. He was incredibly proud of Trudy’s accomplishments and that is partly why he went with her the second time to swim the channel. It wasn’t because he had a dramatic change of heart, but because he always was so proud and wanted to support her.
The book even reads from her younger swim years, “Ederle had the full support of her family. Her father, in particular, burst with pride at his daughter’s accomplishments and accompanied her to nearly every meet.”
There is a scene in the movie after the Olympics and she is disappointed in not doing better and at home she sees that her father has put all of her trophies in a box and she is expected to put swimming on the back burner and now help in the butcher shop. This too wasn’t the case in real life. And as said, the butcher shop was a huge success and the girls never even needed to help out there.
I did like the scene in the movie when she is outside cleaning the shop windows when a young girl and her friends walk up to Trudy and say what an inspiration, she is to them. This interaction is what inspires her to continue swimming because she sees the greater impact her actions have.
Meg
In movie and real life, Trudy was very close to her sister Meg who was also a swimmer. In the movie they show her falling in love with one guy, but then her father makes her marry a different guy they have picked out for her. They have some dramatic moments where they talk about how they don’t have the ability to choose their path in life because they just have to do what society expects but all of this is unique to the movie. The book doesn’t focus on Meg’s personal life and while Meg is the one to really push Trudy to swim the channel in real life and movie, the movie adds more drama with Meg and the parents and all that.
Other changes
The movie also has a scene when Trudy’s mother tells her how her sister drowned when they were young and it makes the mother afraid of water and seems to be in part why she wanted her girls to know how to swim. This was not the case in the book. This seemed like a random scene to include and I wasn’t a fan of this.
Also when Trudy attempts the channel swim the second time, it is a surprise to everyone in the movie and when the radio announces it, the mother is shocked. She and her kids then go to the radio station so they can get updates immediately. This again was over dramatic and I didn’t love this aspect either.
In the movie the Solcum disaster happens when Trudy is a young girl, but in real life it happened before she was even born.
The movie makes Burgess out to be a wild man of sorts, and while men would swim the channel naked, he wasn’t quite the ruffian the movie shows. They tried to add depth to his character in that scene when talking with Trudy about how he has broken every promise he has made to a woman, but rather than provide depth, this just seemed cheesy and stereotypical. It also wasn’t true of the real Burgess who was married and lived in France with this French wife despite being British. I did like the scene though when journalists are getting too close to Trudy to take pictures and they are worried about them touching her which would disqualify the swim. Burgess then pulls out a gun and shoots in their direction to get them to give her space.
Also, in the book it her father whom she makes promise that he will not have her taken from the water unless she explicitly says. In the movie, she tells Burgess not to let her be taken out of the water no matter what and in the film she says she will achieve the swim or die trying.
Book vs movie
I am glad this story was made into a movie because even though it was written about in the book, having it be a movie will allow so many more people to know who Gertrude Ederle is. Including myself by the way! I hadn’t known about her prior to this.
While the performances are fine, I didn’t love that they strayed from the true story in a variety of ways. The story itself is already so amazing, making it all the more dramatic and over the top in some ways, just kind of weakened the reality of it in some ways. And that scene in real life when she tells them what for was so amazing! I was so excited to see this played out on screen! The people in the boat so intense and worried only to have Trudy so carefree and just enjoying her swim was amazing and I am so disappointed that the movie didn’t have that. Also the jellyfish was a dramatic moment in the movie but in real life, yeah swimmers would be stung by jellyfish, but it wasn’t an unusual thing and it was something every channel swimmer had to deal with.
But in case you can’t tell, when it comes to book vs movie, the book wins. This was such an amazing story and the book was well researched and written in an engaging way. The book also shows even more how much swimming meant to Trudy and how she was in her element especially when swimming outdoors. The book reads, “As she herself later said, when swimming she always felt that she could go “on and on . . . when we’re in the water, we’re not in this world.” In a sense, she had developed a real relationship with the water, once saying about swimming in the open ocean, “To me, the sea is like a person—like a child that I’ve known a long time. It sounds crazy, I know, but when I swim in the sea I talk to it. I never feel alone when I’m out there.””
Again, it’s so incredible to read about these pioneers in sports. Be it those who broke racial barriers, or those who broke gender barriers. I know I take running for granted in the sense that there isn’t this belief that females are too delicate for such things, but those who came before me had to fight so much misogyny and judgement.
Ederle proving how tough females can be is what allowed women to run races in the following 1928 Olympics, though their acceptance into the marathon distance came much later (not until the 80’s!). As Stout says in the book, these changes would have happened over time regardless, but thanks to Ederle, they happened all the sooner.
Ederle also fashioned the first ever two piece swim suit because the suits of the time were so baggy and chafed like crazy. So she and her sister made their own swim suit for her to wear, as well as working on her custom goggles themselves in order to make them water resistant. She could have patented both of these and made a bundle, but unfortunately there was no one around her who had this idea to market it.
But yeah, that wraps it up on my thoughts on this book and movie! If you want another movie about someone defying the odds, I will link to Stronger which is somewhat related. If it a memoir by Jeff Bauman who is a survivor of the Boston marathon bombing. He wasn’t running in it, but there cheering for his girlfriend. So even though he himself wasn’t an athlete, it is still an incredible true story and the movie is fantastic.