By Rose Lee
Winning a silver medal for the women’s 100-meter freestyle in the 1948 Summer Olympics may seem like a massive achievement to most. Still, for Cal alumna Ann Curtis, she found her performance in the second event to be disappointing—especially since she earned two gold medals for the 400-meter freestyle and women’s 4x100-meter freestyle relay at the same competition. She “had let down the world,” she would then say, looking back to the moment.
Born in San Francisco, California, Curtis (1926-2012) learned to swim at the Ursuline Convent boarding school in Santa Rosa when she was 9. She started winning swim meets at 11 and considered herself a good swimmer for her age, but began to lose faith in herself when she came in last in a competition at age 14.
Yet when she began training with coach Charlie Sava’s San Francisco Crystal Plunge Swim Club in North Beach in the same year, her swimming career kicked off. Sava was an unconventional swim coach, as he “overtrains” with repetitive and intensive practice and forbade his trainees from dating. Still, this sort of training set his club apart from the rest, and his swimmers dominated the National Amateur Athletic Union Swim Championships. Sava met Curtis in 1940, just before the U.S. joined World War.
Little did he know that he had just found the most excellent swimmer he would ever train. Curtis began to compete in national AAU swim competitions in 1943. Subsequently, Curtis won 34 national championship gold medals, breaking five national records and one world record between 1943 to 1944 at just 17—rightfully claiming the crown that comes with being the woman who won the most national AAU swimming championships to date.
Her incredible performances gained national recognition. The AAU awarded Curtis the annual James E. Sullivan Award, which granted her the title of “most outstanding amateur athlete” in the United States in April 1944. She was not only the first swimmer but also the first woman to win this award since the award was first given in 1930. At the same time, the Associated Press named her the “Woman Athlete of the Year.” Indeed, her achievements were unmatched by any person her age and any woman of her time.
Curtis then attended the University of California, Berkeley, from 1944-1948. However, at the time, the university lacked a pool that women were allowed to use, as well as a women’s swimming team. Thus, Curtis had no choice but to travel to Treasure Island twice a day, every day of the week, to train for the Olympics in the Navy’s 50-meter pool amidst her studies. Cal’s first-ever Athletic Director, Brutus Hamilton (who was a track and field coach at the time), even helped her advocate for a more flexible class schedule that allowed her to do this training there. Whether or not Curtis was able to train properly with all sorts of distractions and barriers was a question everyone asked. Still, she managed to break all kinds of expectations and records.
For Curtis, the 1948 London Olympics was long-awaited and highly anticipated, for the Second World War had forced the last quadrennial international sports competition to be canceled. It was her first and only Olympic competition, and there were only three freestyle races that women could enter. Yet, she entered all three and won a medal in each of them: two gold, one silver.
In the first event, the 400-meter freestyle, Curtis won by nearly four seconds ahead of her closest competitor, winning a gold medal and casually breaking a world record. She then went on to win a silver medal in the 100-meter freestyle and one more gold medal in the women’s 4x100-meter freestyle relay. During the relay, she moved her team from third to first place, passing the Netherlands’ Hannie Termeulen and then Denmark’s Fritze Carstensen and barely winning a second. As a result, the U.S. team won the gold medal contrary to everyone’s anticipation, and Curtis broke yet another Olympic world record.
In her short six-year career from 1943-1948, Curtis broke 56 U.S. records and five world records, which were more than any woman athlete before her time. In 1949, she married Gordon Cuneo, a Cal basketball athlete. Curtis ended her career at age 23 because she wanted to focus on her marriage and accepted an automobile gift from the SF government. She explained that the gesture would make her a professional athlete, and the decision to retire was one she never regretted.
The Crystal Plunge pool where Charlie Sava transformed Curtis’ short but astonishing career was demolished for housing 10 years after its star swimmer won three Olympics medals. Very appropriately, Curtis opened the Ann Curtis Swim Club and School of Swimming with Cuneo in the subsequent year (1959), coaching teams and even Olympians such as Rick DeMont. After decades of dedication to a sport she loved, Curtis passed away in San Rafael in 2012 at age 86.
Today, her name lives on in the International Swimming Hall of Fame, the Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame and the California Athletics Hall of Fame.
