Born: 6 December 1913, United States
Died: 31 January 2004
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Eleanor Holm Jarrett, Eleanor Holm Whalen
American swimmer Eleanor Holm won gold at the 1932 Olympics when she was just 19, having also competed in 1928. However, she was kicked off the 1936 team by U.S. Olympic Committee President Avery Brundage following a party en route to Berlin. Holm maintained that the real reason she was not allowed to compete was a personal grudge by Brundage, later telling another athlete that Brundage had propositioned her and she turned him down. Her version of events:
“This chaperone came up to me and told me it was time to go to bed. God, it was about 9 o’clock, and who wanted to go down in that basement to sleep anyway? So I said to her: ‘Oh, is it really bedtime? Did you make the Olympic team or did I?’ I had had a few glasses of Champagne. So she went to Brundage and complained that I was setting a bad example for the team, and they got together and told me the next morning that I was fired. I was heartbroken.”
Even though Holm was favored to win the 100-meter backstroke and more than half the U.S. Olympic team signed a petition supporting her, Brundage refused to reconsider. She had to watch from the stands; he went on to become president of the International Olympic Committee.
But swimming wasn’t Holm’s only career – even as she competed at the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, she was also doing screen tests. She signed with Warner Bros. but only appeared in one Hollywood feature film, starring opposite fellow Olympian Glenn Morris in 1938’s Tarzan’s Revenge. She did, however, perform live throughout the 1930s.