Word: aileen
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Actually, she's Aileen Riggin Soule nowadays. But in 1920 Miss Riggin was the 14-year-old gold-medal winner in women's springboard diving at the Olympics in Antwerp. "At the time, I was just an eighth-grader from Brooklyn Heights competing for the Women's Swimming Association of New York," says Mrs. Soule, who now lives in Honolulu, where she still swims for the--brace yourself--Humuhumunukunukuapuaa Swim Club. "When Helen Wainwright, who was also 14, and I made the Olympic team that summer, U.S. officials tried to have us disqualified for being too young. But the manager...
...Aileen was the smallest Olympian, too small to compete in her real love, swimming. Diving was just something she did instead, and it was altogether different than it is today. "In Antwerp, we dove into the city canal, a moat really, right alongside the boathouse. In those days, the two final dives were literally picked out of a hat. Our second dive was a forward somersault--you had to land feet first. Fortunately, I went last and watched as all the other girls missed theirs. Then I made mine. But the scoring system was so laborious that you often...
...Aileen made the Olympic diving and swimming teams for the '24 Games in Paris, and she came away with two more medals, a silver medal in the springboard and a bronze in the 100-m backstroke. (She still has medal certificates signed personally by Baron Pierre de Coubertin.) Those were the Games later dramatized in Chariots of Fire, a movie to which Aileen takes great exception. "They did a grave injustice to Charley Paddock, the sprinter who became a dear friend. They portrayed him as a skinny fellow of few words. Why, he was powerfully built, and he could talk...
Paris was her last Olympic competition, although Aileen did return to the '28 Games in Amsterdam as one of the guides for Knute Rockne's overseas cruise for football coaches. Indeed, Aileen seems to have led many lives. She became one of America's first female sportswriters. She danced for Busby Berkeley in Roman Scandals. She skated in a Sonja Henie movie and performed in the first Aquacade for Billy Rose, husband of her friend and fellow mermaid, Eleanor Holm...
...Aileen's first husband, Dwight Young, was killed in World War II, leaving her to raise their daughter Yvonne alone. Aileen later acquired three stepchildren when she married again, to Howard Soule, also a diver. She has continued to write, for the New Yorker, Good Housekeeping and, as recently as January, Swim Canada...