Channel Swim

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 97, 15 July 1927, Page 11

Channel Swim

Still a Big Draw

GIRL COMPETITORS NEW YORK TWINS TO TRY Despite the fact that the English Channel has now been conquered by ten swimmers—eight men and two women—and the record for the swim of 21 hours minutes, put up by Captain Webb in 1875, reduced by the Frenchman Georges Michel to 11 hours 5 minutes, this summer promises to produce the usual shoal of would-be Channel swimmers. Mrs. Corson, the American woman who crossed last year in 15 hours 28 minutes, has decided to attempt the swim again. This time from England to France, a feat which only Captain Webb has accomplished. In the past, Channel swimmers have almost invariably been adults Gertrude Ederle, the 19-year-old American girl who crossed last year in the then record time of 14 hours 30 minutes, was the youngest to have succeeded. Now comes news to the effect that 13-year-old twin sisters. Phyllis and Berenice Zitenfield, of New York, are to attempt the great swim. It is quite possible that these wonderful children will conquer the Channel, for they have performed magnificent natatorial feats in the past. Last season they succeeded in swimming from Yonkers to the Battery in Hudson River in 17£ hours. ENGLISH GIRL KEEN On the other side of the Atlantic a little English girl is busy training for the long swim. She is Miss Hilda Harding, a Brighton photographer's assistant—a small, merry girl, with thick black wavy hair, and only nineteen years of age. She is confident of success, and, perhaps, more important, so is Mr. Jabez Wolffe, the famous trainer. “Miss Harding is the best woman swimmer I have ever had,” Mr. Wolffe said recently. “I consider she is quite as good as Miss Ederle, the eighteen-vear-old American girl who swam the Channel in Jess than fifteen hours last summer. She hasn’t Miss Ederle’s terrific speed, but she has a steady pace. I think she will cross the Channel in under fourteen hours.” Mr. Wolffe’s account of how he came to take up Miss Harding is amusing. She came to him one day and said that she had seen Derham, one of the successful Channel swimmers, swimming out from Brighton, and she had followed him. She found she could easily overtake him, and this had put into her head the idea of crossing the Channel. Mr. Wolffe, instead of waiting until he could see her in the water, made up his mind there and then. He was looking at her face as she talked. “She did not know it,” he said, “but what made me decide to train her was her jaw. She has a very strong jaw, and all good athletes have strong jaws,”