Berlin Games (43 page)

 

If Jesse Owens was the king of the track, then the seventeen-year-old Hendrika ‘Rie' Mastenbroek of Holland was the queen of the swimming pool. Her achievements at Berlin were barely less impressive than those of the American, embracing three gold medals and one silver. Although Mastenbroek was blessed with a phenomenal raw talent, it was abetted by a severely strict training regime implemented by the famous Dutch trainer ‘Ma' Braun, who had spotted Mastenbroek at the age of eleven. Braun's technique was holistic, and involved not just swimming training but also insisted that her pupils followed an ascetic way of life, which appeared to involve eating a lot of kidney beans and bacon. Braun's approach had been proved to work–her daughter Maria had won a gold and a silver medal at the 1928 Games. By 1934 it had been shown to work again, as Mastenbroek won three golds and one silver at the European Championships at Magdenburg. She was just fifteen.

Mastenbroek's first final in Berlin was the 100 metres freestyle, which was held at three o'clock on Monday, 10 August. She was drawn in lane five, and to her right in lane six was the Argentinian Jeanette Campbell. Also in the race was the German champion, Gisela Arendt, who had finished third behind Mastenbroek at Magdenburg.
Arendt felt she could win, however, In the heats, she had swum next to Mastenbroek, and ‘in doing so I had confirmed that I was at my absolute best and that in this condition I could even beat her'. The one thing Arendt didn't want was to be drawn in lane seven–the far-right lane–as she always looked up to her right when she breathed, and when she did so she was able to keep an eye on the competition. In lane seven all she would see would be the side of the pool.

At lunchtime that day, Arendt's trainer, Hans Pausin, told her in which lane she had been drawn. It was lane seven. Arendt's optimism plunged. ‘When an unknown old man came over to our table and said how much he admired my composure,' she recalled, ‘I thought what a good thing it was that we cannot see inside the heads of other people. Because I would rather not have gone back to the Olympic Stadium at all.' Nevertheless, Arendt did her best, and she led for the first 70 metres in the race, at which point Mastenbroek overtook her, as did Jeanette Campbell. The finish was tight, with Mastenbroek coming in first in 1:05.9, Campbell in second with 1:06.4 and Arendt in third with 1:06.6. All three women had beaten the Olympic record. Despite her bronze medal, Arendt was disappointed. ‘The winning of my bronze medal was generally celebrated as a great success,' she recalled. ‘[…] But I will now say quite openly that I did not in any way share this perception of my third place.' Lane seven or not, it is unlikely, however, that Arendt would have beaten Mastenbroek, whose medal haul had only just started.

Thursday, 13 August was a busy day for the seventeen-year-old. At around eleven o'clock, she swam in the heats of the 400 metres freestyle, which she won in the comfortable time of 5:38.6, nearly ten seconds ahead of Schramková of Czechoslovakia in second. At 5.10, she then had to compete in the final of the 100 metres backstroke, in which she faced her fellow countrywoman Dina Senff, Alice Bridges from the United States and Lorna Frampton from Britain. Frampton knew she had little chance of winning, but just to have got to the final was a good result for her. Mastenbroek looked like an awesome opponent. ‘My mother, when she saw her,' said Frampton, ‘thought she had shoulders like a mantelpiece.' The mantelpiece was tired after her earlier exertions, however, and she found the race tough. Although Mastenbroek had broken the world record for the distance earlier in
the year, she managed only to finish second, some three-tenths of a second behind Senff, and 3.4 seconds behind her record. Senff had swum an extraordinary race. At the 50-metre turning point, she had failed to make contact with the end of the pool. Realising that her mistake would get her disqualified, she had turned round, touched the end and then charged back up the pool to win in a time of 1:18.9. Lorna Frampton came sixth in a creditable 1:20.6.

The one woman who could have beaten them was of course Eleanor Holm, who now found herself one of the best-paid journalists in Berlin. Holm watched the race from the stands, sportingly shouting ‘C'mon Alice!' to Alice Bridges, who came third. Could Holm–the beauty who trained on nothing but champagne and cigarettes–have won the race? She could have done, but it would have been tough. Mastenbroek's world record was some 3½ seconds quicker than Holm's Olympic record, set in 1932, a time that Senff had also thoroughly bettered by 1½ seconds in the first heat. Nevertheless, because of Mastenbroek's tiredness and Senff's error, the final was a slow race, and had Holm swum in it and equalled her 1932 record, then she would have won by over half a second. Holm claimed that she had swum the distance in 1:14.7 in training in the spring–if she had repeated that time in the final her victory would have been awesomely commanding.

Even though she wasn't swimming, the vivacious Holm was enjoying Berlin. ‘I had such fun,' she recalled. ‘I enjoyed the parties, the
Heil Hitlers
, the uniforms, the flags. Goering was fun. He had a good personality. So did the one with the club foot.' Goering was clearly captivated by Holm, as he gave her a silver swastika from his uniform. Rumours abounded that Holm had even given a nude swimming exhibition at one of Goering's parties, which she later denied. One person who was not delighted to see her was Avery Brundage. ‘I was invited to everything in Berlin,' said Holm, ‘and he would be there too. He would be so miserable because I was at all these important functions. I would ignore him–like he wasn't even alive. I really think he hated the poor athletes. How dare I be there and take away his thunder? You see, they all wanted to talk to me.'

Friday, 14 August was another busy day for Mastenbroek. In the morning, she had to qualify for the final of the 400 metres freestyle,
and at 4.45 that afternoon she competed in the 4 x 100 metres relay. Mastenbroek anchored the team, and found herself once more racing against Gisela Arendt. Mastenbroek pulled away from the German, but just 2 metres before the finish, disaster nearly struck. An exhausted Mastenbroek inhaled water and started choking. Under normal circumstances, she would have stopped, but there was no way she was going to do that. With her lungs full of water, she swam on and reached the finish to take gold for the team in a new Olympic record of 4:36. Mastenbroek's immediate concern was to cough the water out of her lungs, and her teammates, sensing she was in trouble, hauled her out the water. It was only after she had got her breath back that she was able to celebrate her third medal of the Games.

Just under twenty-four hours later, Mastenbroek was back in the pool, competing in the final of the 400 metres freestyle. Her biggest rival was the Dane Ragnhild Hvegner, whose qualifying time was over ten seconds faster than Mastenbroek's, although Mastenbroek had not pushed herself in the heats. Before the final, the Dutch girl recalled how Hvegner had received a large box of chocolates from her supporters. ‘I hoped that Hvegner would offer me a piece of chocolate,' said Mastenbroek. ‘Hvegner passed me by, deliberately. I was sorely disappointed with this, and thought of revenge.' What mighty contests rise from trivial things. A miffed Mastenbroek swam the first seven laps–350 metres–alongside the chocolate-hoarding Dane, and then punished her meanness by sprinting away in the final lap, reaching the finish a good 1.1 seconds ahead of Hvegner. ‘This is much better than a piece of chocolate,' thought Mastenbroek. Both girls beat the previous Olympic record, although maybe Hvegner might have done better had she not been weighed down by chocolates. Lenore Wingard of the United States came third, although she was never to know her time, as the two judges allocated to her lane forgot to start their stopwatches, a fate that had also befallen Angyel of Hungary in the heats of the men's 1,500 metres freestyle. Mastenbroek received her fourth medal under the floodlights of the main stadium. Her achievements had been superb, but she failed to reap the same whirlwind of publicity as Jesse Owens, partly because of the ‘minor' nature of her sport and because she was a woman, and also because she did not court the attention. When she returned to Rotterdam, she
was greeted by a crowd of well-wishers, but her homecoming was not the beginning of a great period of happiness for the most successful swimmer of her generation. ‘Ma' Braun, it seemed, wanted more than just a pupil.

 

Mastenbroek was by no means the youngest girl to win a medal in the pool. That honour fell to Inge Sorensen of Denmark, who had turned twelve just three weeks before she competed in the final of the 200 metres breaststroke. Remarkably, ‘Little Inge', as she was affectionately called by the Danish press, claimed that she did not train while she was in Berlin. ‘I took a swim once in a while,' she said. ‘Even at home, I only swum once a week for one hour–perhaps more in the summer. Other athletes trained more than me. I was never programmed to think that I could go places. I went to the Olympics simply because I enjoyed swimming.' Sorensen was not the only one who didn't train, although others were not able to rely simply on talent alone. Iris Cummings admitted that she was ‘not as focused' as she should have been, which did not go unnoticed by her friend and room-mate Velma Dunn. ‘She isn't working very hard,' Dunn wrote to her mother. ‘I hope she snaps out of it.' Along with the lack of a proper coach, what really militated against American success in the pool was the water temperature. ‘The practice pool was an outdoor pool and it was
cold
,' the Californian Cummings recalled, ‘a lot colder than we were used to.' Cummings was eliminated in the third heat with a time of 3:21.9.

Despite her youth, Sorensen was calm before the final, which was held on the afternoon of Tuesday, 11 August, watched by, among others, Goering. With Martha Genenger of Germany and Hideko Maehata of Japan in the race, ‘Little Inge' was unlikely to win gold, but bronze was within her grasp. Her rival for third place was Waalberg of Holland, who was ahead of Sorensen for most of the race. The two girls turned simultaneously for the last 50-metre lap. ‘We were side by side up to halfway,' Sorensen recalled, ‘and then I could feel I could do it. Then I started my pull and then I passed her. I was swimming for bronze. I knew I couldn't touch the other two, but I was happy. As soon as I finished I smacked my hands in the water.'

At the medal ceremony in the stadium, Sorensen wore a white dress and a red-and-white scarf that a dressmaker had made specially for her.
‘My friends said, ‘Wear that, it's perfect. And keep your back straight!' I cried when I saw the Danish flag going up. I just cried.' The tears reappeared when she returned to Denmark. ‘We were mobbed when we came off the train on the outskirts of Copenhagen,' she said. ‘The barricades were broken down and the crowd rushed to the train and we couldn't get out. I couldn't find my parents, and it was too much and I was crying. Eventually my father found me and pulled me out.' The image of the crying twelve-year-old and her father made the front pages the following day, earning Sorensen a place in the affections of the Danish people that she still enjoyed into her eighties. The
New York Times
commented wryly on her success. ‘The Olympics are more than a festival of youth,' wrote Albion Ross. ‘Pretty soon they will be getting them out of their cradles to compete for medals and laurel wreaths.'

 

The American women fared better in the springboard diving and the high diving. The former was won by Marjorie Gestring of the United States at the age of 13 years and 268 days–she remains the youngest ever individual Olympic champion. The United States won silver and bronze as well, the former going to to Katherine Rawls, and the latter to Dorothy Poynton Hill. Along with Eleanor Holm, Poynton Hill was the most glamorous of the American ‘mermaids'. At the age of thirteen, she had won bronze in the event at Amsterdam in 1928, and had won gold in the high diving in Los Angeles in 1932. With a huge smile, bottle-blonde hair, a knowing look and a figure that she was more than happy to show off, Poynton Hill soon attracted a lot of attention. She even had bit parts in a couple of movies in 1931–
Palmy Days
, starring Eddie Cantor, and
Movie Town
with Marjorie Beebe. By 1936, the pressure for her to win was great, a pressure applied not just by herself, but by others who had a stake in her. ‘I had already made a commitment to endorse Camel cigarettes,' she recalled, ‘Hollywood bathing suits, and some other things, and if I had lost, all that would have been gone […] I hadn't signed anything, but you couldn't even mention that you were thinking about it. If Brundage had even suspected, he would have kicked me off the team.'

Although she had not won at the springboard, Poynton Hill had a second chance at gold in the high diving, which was held the following
day, on Thursday, 13 August. As in the springboard event, the United States looked as if it might take home all the medals, with Velma Dunn and Cornelia Gilissen both likely to take places on the podium. The trio was not a happy one, however, as Dunn reported to her mother before the event.

Dunn's mother must have read her daughter's pay-off with a raised eyebrow. It looked as if the pressure exerted by the tobacco and clothing companies on Poynton Hill made her behaviour most un-Olympic in spirit.

In the end, the event was a contest between three women–Poynton Hill, Dunn and Käte Koehler of Germany. The girls had to perform four groups of dives, which were scored by seven judges. After the first group, Poynton Hill had scored 7.81 to Dunn's 7.59 and Koehler's 7.26. Between the dives, Poynton Hill would walk coquettishly round the pool, wearing high-heeled sandals with straps around the ankles. Instead of wearing the team-issued black swimsuit, she wore a gingham number with a lower and more revealing décolletage. The effect was enhanced with immaculately plucked eyebrows and waterproof make-up. No wonder girls like Velma Dunn hissed.