Sport: Daughters’ Girl

In four days of splashing up & down the 50-meter pool at Detroit’s River Rouge Park last week the best girl swimmers and divers in the U. S. accomplished the remarkable feat of setting no new U. S. record. It was the first time on record that a national Amateur Athletic Union championship meet had failed to produce at least one. This indication that swimming & diving technique is approaching perfection gave more importance to the nine championships decided. Individual titles :

100-meter free style: Olive McKean
1-mi. free style: Lenore Kight
3-meter springboard diving: Katherine Rawls
220-yd. backstroke: Alice Bridges
440-yd. free style : Lenore Kight
880-yd. free style : Lenore Kight
220-yd. breast stroke: Ann Govednik
Platform diving: Dorothy Poynton Hill
300-meter medley: Katherine Rawls

Two years ago broad-shouldered Helene Madison, now a cinemactress and out of amateur competition, was the No. 1 amateur girl swimmer in the U. S. Last year Lenore Kight, a pretty, dark-haired husky girl from Homestead, Pa.,* won four of Miss Madison’s titles. Last week, Miss Kight successfully defended three of her championships, helped her team win the 880-yd. relay, but in the sprint which meant most — 100-meter free style — she came in second.

Almost exactly abreast as they spun into the turn after the first length of the pool, Olive McKean and Lenore Kight started back through the ruffled water for the final dash. As if a private current favored her, Miss McKean drew smoothly ahead in the last 25 meters, touched the wall a full three yards ahead. Later in the same afternoon, swimming with a precise cadence of 51 strokes per lap for 32 laps, Miss Kight consoled herself by winning the mile swim in 25:10.5.

Most recent addition to the little band of champion swimmers, whose sunburned legs, smooth heads and wide enthusiastic smiles make them the most attractive athletes in the country, Olive McKean is 18, a product of Seattle’s municipal competitions. Last spring she graduated from high school, plans to continue amateur competition at least until the 1936 Olympic Games. Over her brown, bobbed hair she wears only one tight cap, insists that it must have no chinstrap. Built like Helene Madison (5 ft. 10 in., 145 lb.) she swims the same way, with an extraordinary glide between long and languid-looking strokes. This is partly due to the fact that McKean and Madison had the same coach — Ray Daughters of Seattle’s Washington A. C., who uses an outboard motor to churn up the tank in which his pupils practice, advises them to eat raw vegetables and milk.

Another protégé of Coach Daughters is University of Washington’s amazing Jack Medica, who, at the A. A. U. men’s championships at Chicago month ago, broke the world’s record for the mile in 20:57.8. smashing the records for the 350, 1,100 and 1,320-yd. distances on his way. At 19, he now holds seven world and eleven U. S. records. Son of an Italian office clerk, Swimmer Medica likes spaghetti, milk, beer. Excessively lazy, he walks as little as possible on his way to and from practice, lies dozing beside the pool until called upon to swim. Like Miss McKean, he learned young, in Seattle’s Green Lake. Last week, with Al Vande Weghe, 17-year-old Paterson, N. J. backstroke star, and Art Highland of Northwestern University, he was en route to Tokyo to enter the Japanese National Championships this month against the little yellow men who won almost every important swimming event in the 1932 Olympic Games.

*A suburb of Pittsburgh, site of the Carnegie steel mills, scene of the great Homestead Steel Strike in 1892, which lasted 143 days.