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Sports|Iris Cummings Critchell, 104, Dies; Olympic Swimmer Turned Aviator
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/29/sports/iris-cummings-critchell-dead.html
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The last survivor of the American team that competed in Hitler’s 1936 Games in Berlin, she went on to become a wartime pilot and an aeronautics instructor.
Jan. 29, 2025, 6:10 p.m. ET
Iris Cummings Critchell, a swimmer who was the last survivor of the American team that competed in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin and an influential aviator who flew bombers as a pilot with the Women’s Air Force in World War II, died on Friday in Claremont, Calif. She was 104.
Her death was announced by Harvey Mudd College, in Claremont, where she was an instructor of aeronautics emerita.
Ms. Critchell was 15 years old and known as Iris Cummings when she competed in Berlin, in Games in which Adolf Hitler hoped to showcase the supposed superiority of Nazi Germany’s Aryan athletes.
She had started swimming competitively a few years earlier, after her parents took her to the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, where her father served as a track-and-field official. She excelled in the trials for the 1936 Olympic team, but she and the other members struggled to raise funds for the trip to Hamburg, Germany, from New York on the steamship Manhattan.
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“We had been wandering around trying to raise money, not training,” she told Swimming World magazine in 1984. “In those 10 days before the boat sailed, I didn’t even get in a pool, I never saw a coach, and I didn’t have any chance to train. I think we may have gone back to Philadelphia for five days and then back to New York, because we couldn’t afford hotels in New York.”
