Lynne Cox was "guest of honor" for our 2005 Alcatraz Swim.

Photo by Ann Chatillon.

Lynne Cox and Janis Rock!

(read Lynne's LA Times editorial, July 17, 2005: "Wrong Body, Right Attitude: She wasn't built for pools, but she swam the distance without enhancement.")

For those of you old enough to remember, when they used to introduce Janis Joplin the announcer would say "One great, group and one great, great, girl -- Big Brother and the Holding Company! -- The crowd would go wild and there on stage would be Janis singing Big Mama Thornton's "Ball and Chain," which even begins with a water image...
"Sitting down by the window...looking at the rain".

I get the same feelings when I think about Lynne Cox's open water swimming career, as I do when I listen to Janis' sing the blues and it's because, there is just nothing held back, nothing left to give, when they're through from either one of them.

In a swimming world surrounded by great swimmers, Lynne has proved over the years to have been a really great, great, swimmer, one whose effect goes beyond the art of long distance swimming.

The major points of her successful long distance swimming career are widely known to us.

• 1971-First crossing of the Catalina Island Channel.
• 1972-Women's and Men's record for crossing the English Channel.
• 1973-Women's and Men's record for crossing the English Channel.
• 1974-Catalina Island Channel Crossing record.
• 1975 first woman to cross Cook Strait's between the islands of New Zealand.
• 1988-Beagle Channel crossing between Chile and Argentina.

However her most famous swim was her crossing of the 2.7 mile Bering Strait in 38-42 degree water in 1987. It was a swim that not only astonished physiologists, but is credited as an act that thawed relations and began the end of the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Presidents Gorbachev and Reagan toasted her in the White House as someone who had helped usher in an era of "glasnost and perestroika" between the two countries through swimming. Amazing!

The International Swimming Hall of Fame calls Lynne, the world's best cold-water open water swimmer. Through swimming she has dined with Presidents and Kings, written a best-selling book and been on TV. However her relevance for us is that her swimming brings us a message of moral courage and as surprisingly as these words will seem-love of others.

For me, if you close your eyes, you visualize a swimmer, using a freestyle stroke, taking it out hard and fast, challenging the elements, describing arcs of triumph across bodies of water, then I feel that heroic image was put there by a fifteen-year-old girl named Lynne Cox.

In 1972 she stood on Shakespeare's Beach near Dover England and waited to fly across the English Channel. She had been trained by Don Gambril, one of the most successful Olympic coaches in any sport. They had developed a training routine that took interval training in the pool and adapted it to the long distance requirements of the ocean. When Lynne entered the water, she not only had her mind set on getting to France, but doing it in a way that was true to the training her coach had provided. When she stepped from the water, the world had another image to mold future challenges against the forbidding Atlantic, the Everest of open water swims. It was an uncompromising vison for beginning where you want, ending where you want, on the day and time you said you would do it. "Gun fight at noon, be there, bring a weapon!"

Two years later Lynne's swim across Cook Strait helped define for me this, unique, talented, world class, swimmer. At the halfway point, she was farther away from shore than she was when she began and yet she pressed on when she heard over the radio New Zealanders were closely following the progress of her swim. It showed me that she swam through the night for someone besides herself, for those that waited on the beach, for those that she told she would come and more importantly she did.

The unifying element of all her swims is that she swims from her heart in an uncompromising way, often on a public stage she has created, that leave little room for failure and she wins! She triumphs!

One of the things that differentiates other mammals that swim and human is that we use our intelligence to learn how to go faster, longer and farther in the water. In Lynne's case she also used her imagination to train and plan her swims and in doing so created a team around her, some of whom remain close friends to this day.

Lynne's swims were accomplished because she used her mind and imagination to create and carefully plan them. However she was given the motivation necessary to execute them, because she did not want to let her team down.

"Come see Lynne baby, everything gonna be all right--Yeah!"

I believe if we were watching carefully, we have with us today at our event, a gifted swimmer, who has always done what she said she would do in an uncompromising way, in a series of almost selfless acts of expression of love, for others, for her team, using her chosen medium of expression long distance swimming. In our times today this makes her an extremely special and rare individual. The South End loves you Lynne! We're happy you're here with us.

- Bill Wygant