On This Day In History - The 1st Of 23 Solo WRs By GDR* 'Wunder' Kornelia Ender
Timeline - The SOS Daily Trawl of official World long-course records (plus all pre 1954 standards, all pools and metrics) set this day throughout history.
April 13 and 14
On April 13, 1973, 52 years ago this weekend, East German Kornelia Ender swam a touch inside Australian Shane Gould's best over 200m medley to set the first of her 23 solo global standards in a count of 29 world records, including 9 GDR relays.
If the number of records was astonishing, the margins by which she made progress in a short space of time were jaw-dropping.
Olympic silver medalist behind Gould in 1972 aged 13, Ender's first 200IM world mark was 2mins 23.01sec. Three years on, by June 1976, she had taken on a wholly different physique and improved to 2:17.14sec. The event had been dropped from the Games in that year and Ender's most extraordinary performances were seen in sprint freestyle events.
Had the 200IM and a 4x200m freestyle been a part of the women's program, we would likely have witnessed the first female tally of seven golds just four years after Mark Spitz set that record among men.
The day after breaking Gould's standard on medley, at East German Championships in East Berlin on April 14, 1973, Ender took down another 1972 Olympic champion's mark, her 1:03.05 in the 100m butterfly 0.29sec inside the gold-medal-winning time off Japan's Mayumi Aoki. It was July 22, 1976 when Ender became the next Olympic 100 'fly champion in 1:00.13.
In three years, Ender had moved the clock on by a margin it has taken almost a decade to achieve leading up to Aoki's win in Munich. It would take 24 years for a further 3-plus seconds to be axed off the speed Ender achieved twice, at trials and then at the Games, in 1976.
Ender was, as we have long known, a product of the GDR's state-secret doping program protected by an IOC-accredited laboratory in Saxony.
Craig Lord
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