Helen Wainwright
Helen E. Wainwright, also known by her married name Helen Stelling, was a competition diver and swimmer who represented the United States at the 1920 Summer Olympics and 1924 Summer Olympics. She remains the only woman to ever win Olympic silver medals in both swimming and diving.Biography
Helen Wainwright was the daughter of John Wainwright, a bricklayer from Lancaster, England, who emigrated to New York in 1888.
She was a member of the Women's Swimming Association of New York. Swimming coach Louis de B. Handley called Wainwright the world's fastest swimmer. She won 19 gold medals in U.S. national championships, 17 of them for swimming and the other two for diving events.
At the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, aged just 14 years old, Wainwright won the silver medal in the women's 3-meter springboard competition. Four years later, at the 1924 Olympics in Paris, she won the silver medal in the women's 400-meter freestyle event.
On August 19, 1922, Wainwright set a world record in the women's 1500 metres freestyle swimming event, which stood for over three years.
Shortly after the 1924 Olympics, she performed in swimming-and-diving shows at the New York Hippodrome along with fellow Olympians Aileen Riggin and Gertrude Ederle. They later toured round some of the biggest theaters in the U.S. using a portable water tank.
Wainwright very nearly became the first woman to swim the English Channel in 1926; she was selected by the WSA to make the attempt but was forced to pull out due to an injury, so her teammate Gertrude Ederle was chosen to take her place.
In the 1930s, she became a swimming coach on cruise liners out of New York. She married a career military man, Lt. Cree Stelling.
Wainwright was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 1972.
