New York has a history of honoring women athletes.
New York City is throwing a ticker tape parade in the Canyon of Heroes for the Women’s National Basketball Association champion New York Liberty players for but this is not the first time women are being honored for a sports accomplishment. Ninety-eight years ago, Gertrude Ederle was given the city’s 19th ticker tape parade on August 27th for swimming the English Channel. Ederle was a native New Yorker who learned how to swim on city beaches and in New Jersey, She competed in the 1924 Paris Summer Olympics winning three medals, one of them gold. The following year, she became the first woman to swim the length of New York Bay. But that wasn’t enough, she wanted to swim the English Channel. She didn’t complete the swim in 1925.
In 1926, Ederle made some changes. She got rid of the women’s traditional bathing suit that she’d worn last time for a practical one and she designed herself. A two-piece suit Women’s bathing suits were basically wool dresses with stockings and shoes when they emerged in the late 19th century. She was lathered up in grease as well. Her challenges included quickly changing tides, six-foot waves, frigid temperatures and lots of jellyfish. Ederle not only made it across, she beat all of the previous men’s times by swimming 35 miles in 14 and a half hours. When she returned to America, two million people greeted Ederle with New York City’s first ticker-tape parade to honor a woman. President Calvin Coolidge called her “America’s best girl.” On September 10th, 1926, Mille Gade Corson, the second woman to swim the English Channel, got a ticker tape parade. Ederle and Corson remain the only individual sports women to get ticker tape parades in Manhattan. The last Manhattan parade honoring sports women was in 2019 for the US World Cup winning soccer team.
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The New York Liberty organization is getting a Manhattan ticker tape parade.
