One swimming career that was lost to the years of the Second World War WWII that followed on the heels of a Berlin 1936 Olympics used to propagandise the Nazi regime stands above all others in the aquatics history file labelled “what might have been”: Ragnhild Hveger, of Nyborg, Denmark, was the most prolific record-breaking swimmer never to have won an Olympic title.

When Ragnhild Hveger won gold medals for Denmark in three of the five events at the 1938 European Swimming Championships at Wembley's Empire Pool in London, a predecessor swimming correspondent of mine on The Times (London) named her the “Golden Torpedo”.

I still think my 'Eric the Eel' at Sydney 2000 had an edge on the Dane's media moniker, though the Torpedo was certainly the faster athlete: her 2:21.7 World record over 200m freestyle in September 1938 in Aarhus not only stood for 17 and a half years until the advent of Australian legend-in-the-making Dawn Fraser, but was achieved at almost twice the speed-per-metre that Eric mustered over 100m 62 years later.

Between 1936 and 1942, she set 44 world records, won a silver in the 1936 Berlin Olympics aged 15, and in 1940, the year when Nazi Germany's occupying forces moved into Denmark, she was described by a newspaper for the invading troops as “the most successful sportswoman in the world”.

That and other links with the Nazis, as well as the lack of an Olympic gold during her peak years when the 1940 and 1944 Games might have been held were it not for Hitler and his appeasers, would come to frame Hveger's legacy.