Olympic Games Attended: St. Louis 1904, London 1908

Olympic Medals: 220-yard freestyle (gold), 440-yard freestyle(gold), 4 x 50-yard relay (gold), 100-yard freestyle(silver), and 50-yard freestyle (bronze)—St. Louis; 100-meter freestyle (gold) and 4 x 200 relay (bronze)—London

Additional Accomplishments: Won 33 U.S. National Championships, held 14 world records, nducted into Olympic Hall of Fame, 1988

Charles Daniels was one of the most important figures in the early history of competitive swimming. Born March 24, 1885, he won four Olympic gold medals and 33 U.S. National championships. He was the first American to win a swimming event at an Olympic Games. He won gold in the 220-yard freestyle, 440-yard freestyle, and 4 x

50-yard freestyle relay in 1904, and the 100-meter freestyle in 1908.

Known as “Danny” by his teammates, Daniels learned to swim at age 9 but didn’t start competing until 1903. At school he ran the half mile and the mile, and in his spare time won the national junior rifle championship at Madi-son Square Gardens. He is the man credited with evolving the American crawl from the two-beat Australian crawl, and in 1905 he set 14 world records in one four-day period. At one point he held every world freestyle record from 25 yards to one mile, and he was named the 1909 North American Athlete of the Year by the Helms Athletic Board.

Daniels trained at the New York Athletic Club with Gus Sundstrom, who introduced him to a stroke known as the Australian crawl. Daniels took to it quickly and easily. He combined the advantages of the double-handed Trudgen stroke, brought back from South America by England’s J. Arthur Trudgen, and the Australian crawl, developed by transplanted Englishman Frederick Cavill.

In the crawl, swimmers used a hand-over-hand stroke with a flutter kick, the legs moving up and down, alternately, in the water. Daniels improved the stroke by emphasizing use of the full leg, from the hips down, and synchronizing the kick with the arm action, using six kicks per two-arm cycle. On the cutting edge of a revolution in technique, by 1904 Daniels had already set eight new records indoors in distances from 150 to 300 yards.

The “American crawl,” as the new stroke became known, is still used by all freestyle swimmers, with some minor modifications. Charlie Daniels died on August 9, 1973.

In total, Daniels won seven officially recognized Olympic medals. He also attended the 1906 unofficial Olympic Games held in Athens, also called the First Intercalated Games, where he won the gold medal in the 100-meter freestyle. Because the 1906 games were not organized by the IOC, they are not officially recognized, nor are athletes’ medals included in any official medal count. Still, these games are noteworthy because they introduced the opening ceremonies as a separate event, the march of nations, and a closing ceremony. They were also the first time women competed. Twenty of the 903 athletes from 20 nations in 1906 were women. In fact, historians often credit the 1906 First Intercalated Games as salvaging the Modern Olympic Games.