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The Watermen: The Birth of American Swimming and One Young Man's Fight to Capture Olympic Gold
The feel-good underdog story of "one of the most fascinating people not only in the sport of swimming but in all of athletics" (Olympic gold medalist Rowdy Gaines): the first American swimmer to win Olympic gold, set against the turbulent rebirth of the modern Games-for fans of The Boys in the Boat and Seabiscuit
"A truly compelling story of athletic triumph, individual perseverance in the face of adversity, and significant social history."-Bob Costas, former NBC host of twelve Olympic Games
In the early twentieth century, few Americans knew how to swim, and swimming as a competitive sport was almost unheard of. That is, until Charles Daniels took to the water.
On the surface, young Charles had it all: high-society parents, a place at an exclusive New York City prep school, summer vacations in the Adirondacks. But the scrawny teenager suffered from extreme anxiety thanks to a sadistic father who mired the family in bankruptcy and scandal before abandoning Charles and his mother altogether. Charles's only source of joy was swimming. But with no one to teach him, he struggled with technique-until he caught the eye of two immigrant coaches hell-bent on building a U.S. swim program that could rival the British Empire's seventy-year domination of the sport.
Interwoven with the story of Charles's efforts to overcome his family's disgrace is the compelling history of the struggle to establish the modern Olympics in an era when competitive sports were still in their infancy. When the powerful British Empire finally legitimized the Games by hosting the fourth Olympiad in 1908, Charles's hard-fought rise climaxed in a gold-medal race where British judges prepared a trap to ensure the American upstart's defeat.
Set in the early days of a rapidly changing twentieth century, The Watermen-a term used at the time to describe men skilled in water sports-tells an engrossing story of grit, of the growth of a major new sport in which Americans would prevail, and of a young man's determination to excel.
"A truly compelling story of athletic triumph, individual perseverance in the face of adversity, and significant social history."-Bob Costas, former NBC host of twelve Olympic Games
In the early twentieth century, few Americans knew how to swim, and swimming as a competitive sport was almost unheard of. That is, until Charles Daniels took to the water.
On the surface, young Charles had it all: high-society parents, a place at an exclusive New York City prep school, summer vacations in the Adirondacks. But the scrawny teenager suffered from extreme anxiety thanks to a sadistic father who mired the family in bankruptcy and scandal before abandoning Charles and his mother altogether. Charles's only source of joy was swimming. But with no one to teach him, he struggled with technique-until he caught the eye of two immigrant coaches hell-bent on building a U.S. swim program that could rival the British Empire's seventy-year domination of the sport.
Interwoven with the story of Charles's efforts to overcome his family's disgrace is the compelling history of the struggle to establish the modern Olympics in an era when competitive sports were still in their infancy. When the powerful British Empire finally legitimized the Games by hosting the fourth Olympiad in 1908, Charles's hard-fought rise climaxed in a gold-medal race where British judges prepared a trap to ensure the American upstart's defeat.
Set in the early days of a rapidly changing twentieth century, The Watermen-a term used at the time to describe men skilled in water sports-tells an engrossing story of grit, of the growth of a major new sport in which Americans would prevail, and of a young man's determination to excel.
Editorial Reviews
"A thrilling sports story about the power of perseverance in the Victorian age, The Watermen kept me up late into the night. There are three underdogs in this story-Charles Daniels, American swimming, and the modern Olympic Games-and I rooted for them all."-Lydia Reeder, author of Dust Bowl Girls
"The first American ever acclaimed as the ‘world's fastest swimmer,' Charlie Daniels seemed to have it all-good looks, high-society background, Olympic gold, and world records galore. Out of sight, though, he had to fight his own self-doubts, the long shadow of his famous swindler-father, and a British-dominated swimming establishment that didn't want an American to succeed . . . A lively account of high ambitions, low behavior, and a lone athlete with an indomitable will."-Howard Means, author of Splash!: 10,000 Years of Swimming
"The Watermen is a propulsive, deeply researched, and empathetic book. It is the intimate tale of an athlete driven to greatness and the forces that drove him there, and an exhilarating plunge into the early history of competitive American swimming, the Olympic movement, and the rich and powerful people who shaped sports for a century to come."-Eric Nusbaum, author of Stealing Home
"Michael Loynd has crafted the best page-turner about Olympic competition since The Boys in the Boat. I found myself leaning into his vivid descriptions of filthy pools, chicanery among officials, and experimentation with just about any stroke that could push humans faster. If you swim at any level or simply care about how a popular sport develops, The Watermen is a great read."-Kevin Salwen, author of The Suspect
"The Watermen is not simply a sports tale, but a sensational book about courage, the power of the mind over the physical body, ambition, along with the history of the Olympics. . . . A triumph of originality and craftsmanship."-Roseanne Montillo, author of Fire on the Track
"Told in an involving narrative-nonfiction style, Loynd's book folds Daniels' inspirational story into a broader account of Olympics history. Dramatic subplots inclu...
"The first American ever acclaimed as the ‘world's fastest swimmer,' Charlie Daniels seemed to have it all-good looks, high-society background, Olympic gold, and world records galore. Out of sight, though, he had to fight his own self-doubts, the long shadow of his famous swindler-father, and a British-dominated swimming establishment that didn't want an American to succeed . . . A lively account of high ambitions, low behavior, and a lone athlete with an indomitable will."-Howard Means, author of Splash!: 10,000 Years of Swimming
"The Watermen is a propulsive, deeply researched, and empathetic book. It is the intimate tale of an athlete driven to greatness and the forces that drove him there, and an exhilarating plunge into the early history of competitive American swimming, the Olympic movement, and the rich and powerful people who shaped sports for a century to come."-Eric Nusbaum, author of Stealing Home
"Michael Loynd has crafted the best page-turner about Olympic competition since The Boys in the Boat. I found myself leaning into his vivid descriptions of filthy pools, chicanery among officials, and experimentation with just about any stroke that could push humans faster. If you swim at any level or simply care about how a popular sport develops, The Watermen is a great read."-Kevin Salwen, author of The Suspect
"The Watermen is not simply a sports tale, but a sensational book about courage, the power of the mind over the physical body, ambition, along with the history of the Olympics. . . . A triumph of originality and craftsmanship."-Roseanne Montillo, author of Fire on the Track
"Told in an involving narrative-nonfiction style, Loynd's book folds Daniels' inspirational story into a broader account of Olympics history. Dramatic subplots inclu...
Short Excerpt Teaser
1.
The Drowning Boy
1896–1899
The path that led Charles Daniels to the water that day was a long, hard, thorny bushwhack that he should never have survived.
Some said it started with a handful of misfits at the New York Athletic Club fantasizing about defeating the unbeatable British Empire. Others claimed it began with a mother and son fighting to keep each other from financial and social ruin.
Charles never forgot the first time he saw the word that would become his destiny. It was a cool April morning in 1896. He was eleven, inhaling the sweet smell of newsprint and fresh ink. Under the yellow hue of his apartment's gaslights and chandeliers, he sat in a spot where he often lost himself in reports of athletic triumphs. Out of New York's fifteen daily English-language newspapers, sports aficionados like Charley preferred William Randolph Hearst's Journal because, unlike other papers that lumped news together like goulash, it introduced the then revolutionary concept of a section dedicated entirely to sports.
Charley flipped through those pages, combing through every article about athletic contests. There was one on Harvard's track men fighting through back-to-back defeats against Princeton and Columbia. Another about Yale's oarsmen training for the Grand Challenge Cup of the prestigious fifty-seventh Henley Royal Regatta in London, which no American team had ever won. The Brooklyn Bridegrooms were preparing to kick off the professional baseball season in front of thousands of anticipated fans in the wooden bleachers at Eastern Park. And then, near an ad claiming any person was behind the times if they did not join New York City's fifteen thousand other telephone subscribers, appeared an utterly foreign headline: "The Olympic Games."
Like most people at the time, Charley had never heard of an Olympian. The sound of trolley cars, horse carriages, and pedestrians below the apartment window faded as he read on. The short article described a seemingly mythical stadium in Athens with a mind-boggling fifty thousand gleaming white marble seats that stretched beautifully to the sky, with fifty thousand more spectators sitting on a hillside overlooking the venue's basin. The image seemed lifted straight from Greek myth.
The concept of a stadium had been lost to history. Not since the last ancient stadiums of the Greek and Roman empires crumbled to ruin had the world known such a breathtaking athletic arena. Accounts of Rome's unmatched 200,000-seat Circus Maximus or Greece's 50,000-seat stadium at Olympia had been reduced to legend. Only the bones of Rome's Colosseum still bore proof that such colossi once existed on Earth, compared with the day's uninspiring wooden grandstands that held several thousand bodies. Yet, halfway across the world, these new Olympic Games had inspired the Greeks to restore the ruins of Athens's ancient venue to its former glory.
The fourteen brave young warriors from Princeton University and Boston who had stepped into this gladiatorial arena were not the top college stars whom Charley regularly read about in the paper. He discovered that, strangely, the world's best athletes had not participated. There were several reasons for this. As a practical matter, most of the top amateur athletes could afford neither the time nor the expense to travel abroad. There was no precedent for raising money for such a venture. There were no uniform international rules to govern such competitions. And other than the Americans, Germans, and subjects of the British Empire, most of the world showed little enthusiasm for sports and no enthusiasm for international competition.
The powerful amateur athletic unions of the British Empire and America thought the very concept of international play suspicious and refused to support such a boondoggle. Of the 74 foreign athletes who traveled to compete that year with the 167 Greeks in the first modern Olympic Games, most had self-selected themselves. In America's case, the biggest criterion for participating was the financial means to make the twelve-day journey by ship and, of course, knowing the Games existed in the first place. The wealthy college boys who went on a lark, seeing it as an amusing jaunt on their European spring vacation, won a surprising nine of the twelve track-and-field events. In the Games' opening contest, a triple jumper from Harvard became the first Olympic champion in more than fifteen hundred years. The Americans' eleven total first-place medals surpassed even the host nation's ten victories, stunning the Greeks. Only the lone American swimmer was badly outclassed during a three-quarter-mile race back to shore in the freezing Greek sea that turned into a harrowing, hypothermic orde...
The Drowning Boy
1896–1899
The path that led Charles Daniels to the water that day was a long, hard, thorny bushwhack that he should never have survived.
Some said it started with a handful of misfits at the New York Athletic Club fantasizing about defeating the unbeatable British Empire. Others claimed it began with a mother and son fighting to keep each other from financial and social ruin.
Charles never forgot the first time he saw the word that would become his destiny. It was a cool April morning in 1896. He was eleven, inhaling the sweet smell of newsprint and fresh ink. Under the yellow hue of his apartment's gaslights and chandeliers, he sat in a spot where he often lost himself in reports of athletic triumphs. Out of New York's fifteen daily English-language newspapers, sports aficionados like Charley preferred William Randolph Hearst's Journal because, unlike other papers that lumped news together like goulash, it introduced the then revolutionary concept of a section dedicated entirely to sports.
Charley flipped through those pages, combing through every article about athletic contests. There was one on Harvard's track men fighting through back-to-back defeats against Princeton and Columbia. Another about Yale's oarsmen training for the Grand Challenge Cup of the prestigious fifty-seventh Henley Royal Regatta in London, which no American team had ever won. The Brooklyn Bridegrooms were preparing to kick off the professional baseball season in front of thousands of anticipated fans in the wooden bleachers at Eastern Park. And then, near an ad claiming any person was behind the times if they did not join New York City's fifteen thousand other telephone subscribers, appeared an utterly foreign headline: "The Olympic Games."
Like most people at the time, Charley had never heard of an Olympian. The sound of trolley cars, horse carriages, and pedestrians below the apartment window faded as he read on. The short article described a seemingly mythical stadium in Athens with a mind-boggling fifty thousand gleaming white marble seats that stretched beautifully to the sky, with fifty thousand more spectators sitting on a hillside overlooking the venue's basin. The image seemed lifted straight from Greek myth.
The concept of a stadium had been lost to history. Not since the last ancient stadiums of the Greek and Roman empires crumbled to ruin had the world known such a breathtaking athletic arena. Accounts of Rome's unmatched 200,000-seat Circus Maximus or Greece's 50,000-seat stadium at Olympia had been reduced to legend. Only the bones of Rome's Colosseum still bore proof that such colossi once existed on Earth, compared with the day's uninspiring wooden grandstands that held several thousand bodies. Yet, halfway across the world, these new Olympic Games had inspired the Greeks to restore the ruins of Athens's ancient venue to its former glory.
The fourteen brave young warriors from Princeton University and Boston who had stepped into this gladiatorial arena were not the top college stars whom Charley regularly read about in the paper. He discovered that, strangely, the world's best athletes had not participated. There were several reasons for this. As a practical matter, most of the top amateur athletes could afford neither the time nor the expense to travel abroad. There was no precedent for raising money for such a venture. There were no uniform international rules to govern such competitions. And other than the Americans, Germans, and subjects of the British Empire, most of the world showed little enthusiasm for sports and no enthusiasm for international competition.
The powerful amateur athletic unions of the British Empire and America thought the very concept of international play suspicious and refused to support such a boondoggle. Of the 74 foreign athletes who traveled to compete that year with the 167 Greeks in the first modern Olympic Games, most had self-selected themselves. In America's case, the biggest criterion for participating was the financial means to make the twelve-day journey by ship and, of course, knowing the Games existed in the first place. The wealthy college boys who went on a lark, seeing it as an amusing jaunt on their European spring vacation, won a surprising nine of the twelve track-and-field events. In the Games' opening contest, a triple jumper from Harvard became the first Olympic champion in more than fifteen hundred years. The Americans' eleven total first-place medals surpassed even the host nation's ten victories, stunning the Greeks. Only the lone American swimmer was badly outclassed during a three-quarter-mile race back to shore in the freezing Greek sea that turned into a harrowing, hypothermic orde...
