André Wiersig, 47, first encountered the great myth of swimming in English classes. As a high school student, he was fascinated by the story of Captain Matthew Webb, who was the first to swim across the English Channel in 1875. After 22 hours, Webb casually declared that he only had a little sore muscles. In fact, he couldn't put a shirt on for a week because the salt water had dissolved his skin on his neck - there was only raw meat left.
In the meantime, Wiersig was the first German-speaking swimmer to master the Ocean's Seven, seven major challenges. So he has ...
- struggled 44 miles off Hawaii through the Kaiwi Canal between Molokai and Oahu, where the Portuguese galleys stung him, one of the most painful jellyfish in the world,
- measure the ice-cold North Channel between Ireland and Scotland (34 km),
- brave the wild Kreuzsee on the Japanese Tsugaru Strait (20 km),
- cooks through the Cook Strait between the north and south of New Zealand (26 km),
- also the Santa Catalina Canal in front of Los Angeles (34 km)
- and also conquered the Strait of Gibraltar between Morocco and Spain - only 14 kilometers, with unpredictable currents and often strong winds.
- But he was particularly moved by the moment when he crossed the 33.8 km wide English Channel in September 2014.
When Wiersig climbed onto a rock south of Cap Gris Nez, he also thought of the legendary Gertrud Ederle. She was the first woman to master the English Channel on August 6, 1926, celebrating two million people with a confetti parade in her native New York. The feeling that "I imitated Webb and Ederle touched me deeply", writes Wiersig in his book "Alone at night in the ocean". "I am one of them now, even though the goal seemed unreachable. These are feelings that I will never forget in my life."
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Record hunt on the English Channel: the swimming extremistsAttention to open water swimming has never been as high as in the mid-twenties. The world's best swimmers gathered at Cap Gris Nez between Calais and Boulogne for a record hunt that became one of the earliest global sporting events, fueled by the media and film companies. Japanese, British, Americans and also Germans frolicked there.
"The attraction for the public and the media was the unpredictability, which made every swimming attempt a sensation," says sports historian Swantje Scharenberg. There were also lucrative bonuses.
Careful, seal hunter
Of course, it wasn't just the money that attracted the athletes. Egypt's King Fu'ad I sent the giant Ishak Helmi to the canal to increase the prestige of the young empire. Helmi received $ 25,000 annually for his project. In 1925 he was able to book one of the two cap hotels on his own, thus weakening the competition. The swimmers from the USA were also financially strong. Gertrud Ederle, for example, sponsored her father, who emigrated from Bissingen to New York and became rich there as a butcher.
The Germans found hardly any suitable escort boats for their experiments. "Everything that was really usable in ship material was brought to the side of the American swimmers by the abundant capital of the Americans," complained the reporter accompanying the "Kieler Zeitung" when on August 24, 1926, about the Husum swimmer Otto Kemmerich reported.
Kemmerich made headlines in August 1925 by swimming unaccompanied and in the middle of a storm from Fehmarn to Warnemünde, in a good 20 hours for around 62 kilometers as the crow flies. Kemmerich, 39, was inspired by beacons and also used an airtight jam jar, kept above water by corks. A nautical chart was rolled out and a compass installed on the ground; both held cotton wool stuffed into it.
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Wiersig, André, Eggers, Erik
Alone in the ocean at night. My way through the Ocean's Seven: With a foreword by Steven Munatones
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Publisher Eriks book shelf
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160
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€ 19.90
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When Kemmerich swam in the North Frisian Wadden Sea, he also pulled a bamboo stick with a red signal flag behind him - so that the seal hunters who were out and about at the time did not shoot him.
Kemmerich's expedition to the English Channel was financed by a Kiel entrepreneur who had unsuccessfully wooed President Hindenburg's support for the "national project". Before the Husumer started his experiment on August 23, 1926, he was not without controversy: Kemmerich wore woven gloves with which he could pull better because the fingers were bound together like duck skins.
Caught from behind by the dolphin
When he was on the way to clearly breaking Ederle's record, according to the "Kieler Zeitung" there was a sudden attack: "A clearly visible dolphin rushes towards Kemmerich, lifts him out of the water, that he falls backwards and puts him back a punch in the stomach and on the right arm. " Kemmerich was pulled into the boat half-conscious. The animal had probably mistaken him for a duck because of the webbed skin, the English press mocked, as Gavin Mortimer tells in his grandiose book "The Great Swim".
When Ernst Vierkötter from Cologne undercut Ederle's record by over two hours to 12:38 hours a few days later, the German press celebrated him - in 1927 he received the "Golden Ribbon", forerunner of the "Sportsman of the Year". The newspapers never mentioned Vierkötter's strong handicap in jubilation: he only saw with his left hand since his sister had damaged his right eye when playing with a hat pin when he was young.
Vierkötter had trained enormously in the Rhine, once swimming 106 kilometers from Oberlahnstein to Cologne. He also needed patrons for the English Channel. He used his record to become a professional.
The Cologne native emigrated to Canada and became wealthy when he won the Canada National Exhibition in 1927. This long-distance swim on Lake Ontario was initiated by gum magnate William Wrigley Jr., owner of the Chicago Cubs, and was endowed with 50,000 US dollars in prize money; the winner alone received $ 30,000. Favorite: only 17-year-old Canadian George Young, who was the first to swim the Catalina road off Los Angeles. The race made him as popular as baseball star Babe Ruth at times.
Uh, professional athlete
But "The Catalina Kid" had to give up in a duel against "The Black Shark". "Black shark" was namely Vierkötter's nickname because he rubbed his body and arms with tar paste before the start to protect against the cold.
Gertrude Ederle silvered her fame after 1926 through films and revues. Other swimmers also hired themselves as professionals. The British Mercedes Gleitze, whose parents also came from Germany, received a premium from Rolex in 1927 when she crossed the English Channel with a waterproof watch around her neck.
Kemmerich was also on the road as a professional athlete. Soon after his attempt at the English Channel, he was the first to swim through the Belt, from Fehmarn to Rödby-Hafen - and earned 1000 crowns from the Danish newspaper "Politiken". In addition, Kemmerich won a swim from Malmö to Copenhagen and was hired 30 to 40 times a year by spa and bathing resorts such as Sellin, Westerland or Norderney as a "wonder swimmer".
In April 1927 Kemmerich on Sylt acted as a figurehead for a "radio test swimming" by the radio station Norag, who wanted to test whether you could communicate with him while swimming (you could). He presented himself in a "Continental swimsuit".
Because he made no secret of his profit, the German Swimming Association declared Kemmerich as a professional athlete in 1927 and did not officially recognize his endurance records (in 1928 he swam 46 hours at a time). Therefore Kemmerich, like Vierkötter, was forgotten in Germany.
In 1968 the North Frisian was the first German to be inducted into the Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame - posthumously. In 1952, at the age of 66, Kemmerich had wanted to swim 200 kilometers south of Esbjerg in Denmark to Husum and had drowned off the island of Föhr. The brandy manufacturer Dujardin, as the prize money donor, no longer had to pay the agreed premium for the man who almost became the first German channel swimmer.