On 6 August 1926 Gertrude Ederle swam from Cap Gris-Nez to Kingsdown in fourteen hours and thirty-one minutes, the first woman to cross the English Channel. Five men had done it before her; she was faster than all of them, by roughly two hours. She was twenty years old, greased against the cold, and swam much of it through weather her trainer wanted her to quit in.
Why this oneShe did not simply finish. She took the record off a field that assumed she could not.