Helene Madison - Queen Of Waves
The American ace set 20 individual World freestyle records and at the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, claimed three gold medals in the pool, over 100 and 400m freestyle and as a member of the 4x100m freestyle with USA teammates
Helene Madison (USA) was dubbed “The Queen of Waves“. Her pioneering achievements in the early 1930s live eternal: she was the first swimmer ever to hold every world freestyle record – from 100 (100yd) through to the mile (1500 equivalent) – at the same time, a feat that has been matched only once since, by Shane Gould (AUS, 1971-1972).
Craig Lord
Technically, Gould remains the first to ever be accepted as having held the official 100-1500m records simultaneously: Madison set the 880 yards world mark once in her career, in 1930, but the 800m distance was not an official world record until after the American’s swim, while the distance was not swum in Olympic waters until 1968.
Remove FINA bureaucracy from the sums and Madison, who set her first world mark in March 1930, and her last in August 1932, was the first queen of waves over 100-1500-mile speed.
She clocked 11.41.2 over 880 yards on July 6, 1930 in Long Beach. On August 23, 1931, Yvonne Goddard of France clocked 12.18.8 over 800m and that was, technically, the first official FINA world record over the specific distance of 800m.
Madison, who passed away in 1970, would never know, but in 1973, FINA revisited its world-record history lists, removed Goddard and a swim by American Lenore Kight, from 1933, and accepted Madison’s mark as an official world 800m record. Not long before its decision on Madison, FINA had stopped accepting the 880 yards distance for world-record ratification over 800m, leaving Debbie Meyer, the pioneering 1968 triple Olympic gold medallist for the USA, as the last (and therefore, technically, reigning, world record holder over 880 yards, at 9.44.1 from a swim in 1967.
