Swimmers

P:Helene Madison polishes her finger nails bright red, wears a red silk bathing suit and a red cap, plans to study art next winter in Seattle, where she lives.

P: Katherine Rawls of Hollywood, Fla. is 14 and built like a minnow; unlike her three-year-old sister she hates to dive from high boards because it hurts her ears.

P: Under her right eye, Eleanor Holm wears a waterproof beauty patch. She is so pretty that Ziegfeld offered her a job in the Follies which her mother persuaded her not to take.

P: Georgia Coleman has a mop of blonde hair, a compactly graceful figure, an enormous vitality which Southern California would like to believe comes from the fact that she has always lived there. She used to play baseball with the Chicago Cubs when they trained at Catalina Island, was tumbling in a Los Angeles pool when a swimming coach saw that she might make a good diver.

These are now the best U. S. women swimmers and divers. A few years ago the best were Gertrude Ederle, who swam the British channel Aug. 6, 1926 and is now instructor at a pool near Manhattan; Martha Norelius, who won the Wrigley Marathon in 1929, the Olympic Championship in 1924 and 1928, is now married to Joseph Wright Jr., 1928 Diamond Sculls winner; Helen Wainwright who is giving diving exhibitions on the Berengaria's four-day tours; Aileen Riggin who toured Europe last winter and recently lost a job with Dobbs & Co., bankrupt haberdashers.

At the Bronx Beach pool, New York, the best U. S. women swimmers and divers congregated last week for the A. A. U. championships in a meet made especially important by its bearing on next year's Olympics. The swimmers raced at night, lashing silver lines of spray across a pool which arc-lights made shiny and black. Among the spectators were lifeguards from beaches nearby; parents of contestants; Gertrude Ederle who was amazed at Helene Madison and asked Georgia Coleman for an autograph signed "divingly yours."

Swimmers. Everyone expected Eleanor Holm to win the 300-yd. medley race. Her specialty is the back stroke used on the middle lap, after a 100-yd. breast stroke start and before the 100-yd. crawl at the finish. Instead, wiry little Katherine Rawls wiggled to a 5-yd. lead in the first lap, held it through the second, crawled farther ahead in the last lap and won in 4:45 1/8 four seconds faster than the previous Holm world's record. Next day Minnow Rawls won the 220-yd. breast stroke championship with a new U. S. record. Eleanor Holm, who had had an earache when racing Minnow Rawls, retained the 220-yd. back stroke championship, as anticipated.

The plunge at the start of a race baffled Helene Madison till, after a year of trying, she learned the trick in five minutes. That was five years ago, when she was 13. Last week she won four championships (440-yd. swim, 100-meter, one-mile and 880-yd. free style), caused herself to be mentioned as anchor girl on a 1932 relay team that might beat the Olympic record.

Divers. When Georgia Coleman executes a swan-dive, front or back jackknife, gainer ("flying dutchman"), back-flip or somersault, she does it more efficiently than any other female in the civilized world. So fluent, so sure are her motions in the air that spectators would not be surprised if, as newsreels often show her doing, she paused in mid-air and returned to the springboard. In the high platform championships last week, her execution of a running one-&-a-half forward somersault (see cut) caused judges to prefer her performance to that of plump Frances Meany, whose sister Helen was diving champion before Georgia Coleman. Georgia Coleman also retained her fancy diving championship from a ten-foot springboard at Long Beach, N. Y. Second was versatile Minnow Rawls.

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