Eleanor Holm was a fast swimmer, a woman who broke six world records and won 29 US backstroke titles. She also won the 100m backstroke title at the 1932 Olympic Games - but she will be remembered for the scandal that ensued when she set sail from America on her way to defend her crown in front of Hitler in Berlin, 1936.
Holm was 23 and a woman of the world when she boarded the SS Manhattan with the rest of the US swimming team. She later recalled: "I had been around - I was no baby. Hell, I married Art Jarrett after the '32 Games.
"He was the star at the Coconut Grove, and I went to work singing for his band. I used to take a mike and get up in front of the band in a white bathing suit and a white cowboy hat and high heels. I'd sing I'm an old cowhand...I quit the band a month before the trials to go into training for the Olympics."
Her efforts were wasted, for once on board, she liked life at the bar too much to be stay confined to quarters with her team-mates. A chaperone approached her while she was drinking champagne with reporters and asked her to retire. "Oh, is it really bedtime? Did you make the Olympic team, or did I," Holm admitted to saying.
The chaperone and Avery Brundage, later to become IOC president, agreed that Holm had to go. She was expelled from the US team.
Holm was signed up by a news agency and attended all the best parties once in Berlin and found herself mingling with Hitler, and Brundage, of course. "Goring was fun," she would later say. "Lots of chuckling. And so did the little one with the clubfoot (Goebbels)...Hitler asked me if I got drunk - he seemed very interested - and I said no!"
After the Games, Holm returned home a star and "glamour girl", as she put it. A couple of broken marriages later, she retired to Miami, where she became an interior designer.
CRAIG LORD
The Times
